Brackenwood boss Adam Phillips has already unloaded the contents of his brain into his online Animation Academy, and now he’s turning to video. Never doing anything halfway, Phillips has begun uploading a 33-part demonstration of his process of animating in Flash CS3. He uses scenes from The Last of the Dashkin, which he released at the end of last year, and while it’s not delivered as a tutorial, you can surely pick up some great tips. Here’s part 1:

In this behind-the-scenes clip below, SVA-grad James Sugrue reintroduces a hamster from his Don’t Touch short to illustrate his Flash-animation process:

M. Wartella, an illustrator, comic artist and animator, has worked on several Flash-animated TV series, including Wonder Showzen and Superjail! His recent gig, however, found him creating storyboards for the CG Adult Swim show Xavier: Renegade Angel. For an upcoming episode, the show creators, Vernon Chatman and John Lee, invited him to bring a sequence to life in 2D.

The episode, titled Damnesia Vu, premieres Thursday, March 19th (tomorrow!) at 12:15 am ET/PT. Below we ask him a few questions about the production, and his response includes a video tutorial detailing his one-man-band process. But first, here’s a :25 second clip from the 2:00 minute sequence he animated.

AARON SIMPSON: When did you produce this segment?

M. WARTELLA: The animation was done entirely by hand over the course of one month late last year. No assistants or in-betweeners or background artists or anything like that. Just cranked it out all myself, which isn’t too bad for a two-minute cartoon. I’d just come off a gig storyboarding the second season of Xavier, and I think the show’s directors, Vernon Chatman and John Lee, were inspired to try something different based on the illustrative style of the animatics I was doing. They asked if I’d be willing to animate a special segment, and of course I said yes.

SIMPSON: What type of creative direction were you given?

WARTELLA: Well, I had worked with John and Vernon on Wonder Showzen, so I already had a bit of insight into their particular brand of humor. The premise of this episode, Damnesia Vu, is that Xavier is kind of “Quantum Leaping” into different lives, sort of a reincarnation theme, and they had the idea that it would be a cool twist for Xavier, a CGI character, to jump into a flat 2D world. They wrote the script, and we just kind of developed it back and forth from there.

SIMPSON: What transpired during that back-and-forth?
Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer we posted 3 “behind-the-scenes” vignettes for Ka-Ching Cartoon’s 7-minute Flash-animated short The 3D-Machine, which was produced in stereoscopic 3D. This week, Joost van den Bosch and Erik Verkerk, the Nethlands-based founders of Ka-Ching, have delivered a detailed, step-by-step “how to” video. Below, we learn how to produce the anaglyph images that create the illusion of 3D, using Flash and After Effects.

Michael-Andreas Kuttner

Back in August, the Halifax-based animation studio Collideascope closed its doors. The studio, which began in 1995, was one of the first in the world to use Flash for broadcast TV, pioneering on the series Olliver’s Adventures. The shop will close at the end of this month, and co-founder Michael-Andreas Kuttner pointed us to a recent article that serves as “a eulogy.” The Halifax newspaper The Coast featured a story titled Empty Frames last week, which identifies Collideascope as producing nine shows, 90 hours of cartoons and employing around 400 animators from all over Canada. According to Kuttner’s blog, they had 120 full-time employees at their peak last year. It appears that timing was the culprit, as Kuttner points out. They were scheduled to start a new project this Fall but a delay pushed it off, plus the Canadian studios have seen a great deal of service work head to Asia in recent months. Regardless, the legacy they leave behind will live on in the projects they produced and the artists’ careers that were founded and nurtured at Collideascope. Us animators can also enjoy the many wonderful animation tutorials archived on their blog. Congrats on a great run, guys, and a very graceful exit.