Toon Boom has just announced the upcoming release of Animate 2, a powerful software package that rivals Flash. The second iteration of the software includes full SWF export, better velocity controls and a type tool. The pre-launch price is $549.99, and if you buy now, they’ll give you the first version to use until its’ successor arrives. Here’s some of my favorite Toon Boom animation from recent months:

Um Lugar Comum (A Common Place) from São Paulo-based studio Split Filmes

Water FX from Canadian Chris Graf

I also really like André Ruivo’s Januário e a Guerra.

Nick Cross, the award-winning animator behind films like The Waif of Persephone and Yellow Cake, has embarked on a new short. For The Pig Farmer, however, Cross is staging a fundraising effort to help get the film finished quicker. Using the fundraising website IndieGoGo he aims to raise $5,000, and I just tossed $25 onto the pile. For that I get a mention in the credits and a DVD of the finished film. If I had forked over $100, Cross would have listed me as an Associate Producer and shipped me his entire catalog of films. (update – Nathan Malone added his name to the Associate Producer list)

There’s a few similar sites out there, including Fundable, Kickstarter and Indie Maverick, and animators around the world are having success using this model. For instance, I spotted Line, a stop-motion film by Justin and Shel Wagner Rasch, which has already raised $1,250 en route to their goal of $2,500, and a documentary about documentary about Bill Plympton that’s raised almost as much.

This method seems like no more than a sophisticated version of the ol’ Paypal “donate” button, but it’s apparently working. I’ve always imagined that fundraising is entirely personal, requiring lots of shmoozing, hand-shaking and repeated appeals. But perhaps you just need a slew of Facebook friends and a blog.

The Los Angeles Times featured a piece today on Simon Tofield and Simon’s Cat, the wildly-popular, Flash-animated series. The article, titled Simon Tofield’s success comes in a Flash, was written by Charles Solomon, and it details his rise to fame and his new book that released last month.

ColdHardFlash.com is officially 5 years old today!

In November of 2004, I was working at Warner Bros. Animation and me and a small crew of Flash-converts were still fighting an uphill battle. We were trying to convince the studio chiefs that Flash animated series were a good idea. The seminal Flash-animated series ¡Mucha Lucha! was already well underway, but I think my superiors thought the show’s budgets would magically be cut in half and rainbows would burst out at every schedule meeting. The truth was somewhere in the middle, and animating a TV series with this “web-toy” was still kind of a nutty concept. So I figured I would blog about the prevalence of Flash-animated series around the world, and somehow justify that this was a growing trend. The gorgeous and successful Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends had just premiered on Cartoon Network, which made things a bit easier, but I’d heard of dozens more out there. With a little research, I discovered 9 series that were either in production or planned and that was my first post, titled Flashing the Studios (2 of those series, Omega Dome and Katbot, never surfaced).

Regular posting over the next few weeks brought a trickle of regular viewers, but what I saw as more of a research project had helped my cause at WBA. Spreading this information around internally helped justify further Flash exploration, and soon handfuls of Flash-pilots were in production, including Coconut Fred and Johnny Test, which both made it to TV. To their credit, WBA executives like Marge Dean and Christopher Keenan were way ahead of me, and even if they didn’t use the software, they understood that a revolution was underway.
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In a recent article from Rob Sharp in the UK paper The Independent a prominent Flash animator has detailed his thoughts on the medium. Simon Tofield, the creator Simon’s Cat, is quoted in an article titled Internet animation: Draw it yourself. Here’s what he says:

“I do my films on Flash … and it would take me much longer if I were drawing them all by hand,” Tofield explains. “If I were doing what I do traditionally I would need to draw every frame by hand, then I would need to take them to a professional – a line tester – to photograph all of the images. Then I would need to take notes on them, make corrections over a light box and then shoot them again – it can be a very tedious process.” It is a tribute to the accessibility of the software that Tofield is a self-confessed “technophobe” – he says he knew nothing about computers before he started using Flash. Eighteen months later, Simon’s Cat has been turned into a book and Tofield’s cartoons have been seen online by an estimated 30 million people: far in excess of the audiences he would traditionally have reached. Many of his fans make their own “tribute animations” to his work. “I get a lot of these fan films,” he continues. “Some of them are really sweet. They are made by people who are very young and are very basic but it’s a nice compliment to have. I always try to reply when I can.”