Rubber House, a new animation studio based in Melbourne, has revealed their latest studio promo. It’s a short directed by Gregory Sharp titled The Big Winner, and it was animated by Sharp and Ivan Dixon rather “traditionally” in Flash. It’s full of beautiful drawings, dramatic character animation and painterly environments that were created with a slick-looking painting software package called ArtRage. These guys are good.

Also, go check out Boat People, their entry in the MovieExtra Webfest.

The 33 Chilean miners are all free, rescued from what seemed like a deep underground tomb. The jubilation turned to surprise as one final miner was raised from the depths – Miner 34. By the Brothers McLeod:

Hayk Manukyan brings us a little Halloween humor this week, while poking fun at Lady Gaga and her meat suit. This is titled Creepy Lady Gaga Halloween Prank:

The 21″ Wacom tablets are in short supply, and over on the company’s website they admit that “yes, we had unusually high demand for the new Cintiq 21UX.” It’s a sign of the times, no doubt. Animators and designers alike have “gone digital,” discovering the glory of these $2,000 pressure-sensitive monitors. Us long-time Flash veterans have seen this coming for over a decade now, but it’s more than obvious that the digital 2D revolution has actually become the status quo.

And Wacom aren’t the only game in town – a Taiwanese company is now making the XPC-1910A (inset), with a 19″ pressure sensitive monitor. Listed at $825, the product is currently not available on Amazon, but it’s getting solid reviews like this one over on YouTube, which calls it “an inexpensive alternative.”

But until the Wacom or this XPC-1910A are stocked again, artists and studios are out of luck. One frustrated artist I spotted online said he gave up and “bought an iPad and downloaded Sketch Pro and Brushes.”

I know that the team at Six Point Harness in Hollywood is completely reliant on Cintiqs, with studio founder Dave Vamos calling them the “backbone of our paperless pipeline for over 3 years.” The growing studio is snagging whatever they can off Craigslist and are currently offering $1,400 for used 21 UX models (last generation). If you are interested in selling, contact Vamos directly – dave *at* sixpointharness.com. They offer free pick-up in the LA area.

I have to admit that Flash has begun to look like a real 3rd rate option these days, with Toon Boom taking the lead for 2D production. As a basic animation tool, Flash remains a solid option, but it’s going nowhere, at least for us animators. Adobe isn’t steering the software down a path that helps us, and older (arguably better) versions of the software cease to be supported on new operating systems. The only things keeping me interested in the future of Flash are the independent developers building animation-specific extensions. Below is a demo video for the Keyframe Caddy, which was developed by the Cloudkid team – consisting of Dave Schlafman and Matt Moore. The plug-in offers an animator a visual display of graphic symbols, which helps make tasks like lip sync much easier. I’ve seen similar plug-ins in the past, but this one seems nice and simple.