Those in the Los Angeles area: mark your calendars for April 30th. Along with Jill Gilbert and the top dogs at 5 bad-ass animation studios (Six Point Harness, Titmouse, Renegade, Animax, and Oddbot), I’ll be hosting the next One Plus Hub event. Gilbert’s events have become staples in the Southern California animation community. It’s casual networking, drinks and perhaps a short presentation. We’re focusing on Flash, and more details will follow, but get this into your calendar – 7:00pm at the Formosa Café on the second floor patio – 7156 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA.

See you there!

Adobe’s plans to create a Flash player for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch have been announced. In Ben Charny’s article at the Wall Street Journal, he confirmed that Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen has approved his company’s effort to create a version of Flash Lite for the iPhone using the iPhone SDK. This doesn’t mean that the Safari browser for the iPhone will allow Flash content, but who knows what the future holds.

Thanks to Larry Rains for the story tip.

**** UPDATE ****

Seems like Adobe has their work cut out for them.

This past Friday, my wife and I attended the 35th Annual Annie Awards, which were held on the UCLA campus for the first time. As you may have read here a few months back, it was a proud night for Flash animation.

The big winner at Royce Hall was undeniably Pixar’s feature film Ratatouille – which wrapped up 10 awards. On the TV side, two series took home a pair of trophies – Robot Chicken and Nickelodeon’s Flash-animated series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera. The show, which was created by Jorge Gutierrez and his wife Sandra Equihua, walked away with awards for Best Animated Television Production for Children and Character Design in an Animated Television Production, a category Gutierrez was nominated for two years ago. Congrats to Dave Thomas, Tim Yoon, Gabe Swarr, Roman Laney and the crews at Boulder Media and Six Point Harness. [read Cold Hard Flash interviews with Gutierrez and Yoon]

El Tigre was also nominated in two other categories:

• Monica Kennedy for Character Animation in a Television Production
• Shawn Patterson for Music in an Animated Television Production

Below is one of the El Tigre clips Patterson submitted for the awards. Its from episode 9, titled Yellow Pantera.

Sadly, it looks like this award-winning show will be ending this year, but it will surely go out on a high-note. Nickelodeon hasn’t picked up the second season, and as Patterson put it on his MySpace page “all great things come to an end.”In the Best Animated Television Commercial category, Acme Filmworks’ Powershares spot, titled Escape Average, took top honors. This weekend, I asked Dave Wasson, the director of the commercial, about the ceremony and production experience:

When Patrick Warburton announced that our Powershares spot had won I was completely caught off guard. At past Annie Awards, I’d been nominated quite a few times, but had ever won. So I had sort of given up on the idea of taking home a trophy. I tried to get Ron Diamond and Gwynn Adik to join me on stage but they wouldn’t budge (they’d decide to give me “my moment in the sun”). I hadn’t written anything down so I gave a short, rambling thank you speech and staggered off stage.

The schedule on this spot was crazy; three weeks total from the time I got the outline from the agency until the day we delivered the finished spot. That said, of all of the projects I’ve directed, it was actually one of the most fun. I really clicked with the agency creatives right from the start, and they were completely open to me taking their idea and running with it (incidentally, in case any agency executives are reading this, this is the best recipe for good commercials – I’m just sayin’). Dave Knott and I completed the storyboard in two days. The following day I made the animatic. Using Flash I was able to create the character designs and backgrounds in record time.

Even though our crew was small, they were super talented, which made it all the more enjoyable. I contacted Brendan Burch at Six Point Harness Studios and he hooked us up with a couple of his best guys. Saharat Tantivaranyoo did a beautiful job with the character layouts, and James Krenske’s animation is kick ass! Back at Acme Filmworks, I worked with Nic Mermet on After Effects to composite all the elements together and add all of the multi-plane parallax. All in all, it was really a great experience.

[Watch Wasson's Powershares commercial here at Cold Hard Flash]

Back at the Annie Awards, Flash animation continued to echo throughout the night. The creators of Flash, Jonathan Gay, Gary Grossman and Robert Tatsumi, were honored with the Ub Iwerks Award, which highlights excellence in technical achievement. I won’t go into much more detail on this, as a we’ll be posting a lengthy interview with all three guys tomorrow.

But in the meantime, here’s a clip that played just prior to their award. It’s a collage of various Flash-animated projects from the last 10 years. Antran Manoogian, the president of ASIFA-Hollywood, asked me to assemble the clip, and I was happy to oblige. It’s simply a hint at all of the great Flash animation out there – we surely left out some incredible projects. Thanks to Antran for the invitation, and to Les Perkins for helping me put this together.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Alongside John Canemaker and Glen Keane, John Kricfalusi accepted his Winsor McCay Award, which honors “career contributions to the art of animation.” John K’s The Ren and Stimpy Show was credited with “reinvigorated television animation,” but he was also noted for his pioneering work on the internet’s first cartoon series – The Goddamn George Liquor Program, which was animated entirely in Flash.

There were also a handful of nominees on Friday representing Flash-animated projects:

BEST ANIMATED SHORT SUBJECT
Chip Wass’ short Mascot Prep – part of Disney’s Shorty McShorts’ Shorts project – animated at Boulder Media

ANIMATION PRODUCTION ARTIST
Natasha Liberman – Growing Up Creepie – Discovery Kids

BEST ANIMATED TELEVISION COMMERCIAL
Esurance Homeowners spot – W!LDBRAIN

BEST ANIMATED TELEVISION PRODUCTION FOR CHILDREN
Little Einsteins – Disney Channel
Peep and the Big Wide World – Discovery Kids

Lastly, I’d like to congratulate my cousin, Elizabeth Harvatine, for her nomination in the Character Animation in a Television Production category. She was honored for her stop-motion animation on Adult Swim’s Morel Orel, and her pal Eric Towner took home the trophy for his work on another stop-motion project – Robot Chicken. (inset photo credit – Tennessee Reid Norton)

According to an article in the New York Times written by Stuart Elliott, two Flash-animated Super Bowl commercials drew heavy viewer complaints. The Salesgenie.com spots were posted here earlier this week, and the spot titled Panda features what some consider offensive accents.

According to the article, An Ad With Talking Pandas, Maybe, but Not With Chinese Accents, the CEO of InfoUSA (the Salesgenie.com parent company), Vinod Gupta, is now in hot water.

Watch the spots here.

What’s your take – offensive? Funny? Both?

Thanks to Ryan Simmons for the tip.

The People’s Republic of Cold Hard Flash has been reconstituted! Our latest face lift was a collaborative effort that’s been in the works since (gulp) Fall 2007. The design and animation maestro known as Jez Hall set the tone with a mascot design. Meet ‘Federov,’ a cosmonaut bear named after one of my favorite hockey players – Sergei Federov. Just looking at Jez’ blog, I knew he was the right guy for the job, but then I saw this post of Russian-influenced design, and my jaw nearly dropped. The guy is simply a wizard. Behold his design exploration for Federov…

The site was designed and built by a fantastic company called Dizzain, who I can’t say enough about. I highly, highly recommend sending your web design business their way. They have a special skill set for WordPress blogs, but they’re well equipped to handle all types of website design and production. Thanks to the entire team – especially to Nicole, who answered my every question with calming expertise.

And a pair of shout-outs for Sean McKenzie and Kathleen Quaife, who helped immensely in the design and production phases. They’ve also been two of the more involved community members, and I can’t thank them enough.

As you may have noticed, it’s still a little dusty around here. We’re still fixing bugs, uploading content and applying the finishing touches. But when we get there, this new site will set the platform for an amazing ride. I’ve got some excellent interviews in the works, a huge animation launch under way and the Flash animators of the world are growing by the thousands.

Thanks for joining me on this site for over 3 years, and for many great years to come!