Adobe rolled out their Creative Suite 4 product family today, which includes a fresh new version of Flash - Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. It ships with a few new tools that many of us have been dreaming of for a few years now.

For starters, there’s IK - or Inverse Kinematics. For more on what that is, check out this 3-minute tutorial I put together that illustrates how the Bone Tool can connect graphic symbols together. You may recognize the artwork - it’s an elephant I borrowed from Ed Emberley:

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

And here’s another way to use the bone tool - on vector shapes.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Adobe has also introduced object-based animation, which for some may replace the stand key-frame tweening method. For hard-core Flash-animators, this may not be visually robust enough, as when you’re handling a dozen assets and even more layers, those visual keyframes become a sort of braille-like language. This object-based functionality will likely appeal most to beginners who will enjoy quickly creating motion in a manner that’s perhaps a bit more intuitive.

There’s also a 3D transform tool, which could have some interesting applications for those who don’t want to take their camera-work into After Effects. Speaking of After Effects, we’re also seeing a new Motion Editor toolset, which offers bezier curve refinement functionality that will look familiar to those who work in AE.

A few months back, I wrote about Cut&Paste’s See What’s Possible Challenge, sponsored by Adobe, which featured several shorts animated in Flash. I somehow missed this one, titled Living Colorforms, which was designed and animated by Claude William Trebutien (Burning Safari). It should come as no surprise that Trebutien is a Gobelins graduate, and the art direction was provided by Baeyens Michael, who attended ESRA in Paris.

Head over to to the TroisCube website to see how they created the short, a process that also involved After Effects.

Flash animators began experimenting with “paperless” animation over 10 years ago. Artists fond of the Adobe creative suite have gone on to create hundreds of thousands of short films, and in an era when 3D animation seems all the rage, Flash animators have ushered in a powerful new wave of 2D animation.

Often derided as a tool that encourages shortcuts and poor illustration work, Flash is also the technological might behind a great deal of truly breathtaking work. Today, along with our main sponsor MyToons.com, “the Premiere Online Animation Community”, we celebrate these films with an online film festival - The Flash Animation 10: Best Animated. Want to know which film took first prize and an Adobe Master Collection valued at US$2,499? Click here to watch the 10 films and find out.

The 10 films featured here were selected by a panel of animation industry rock stars, few of whom are Flash users. This was intentional, as the judging criteria was simply “choose the best animated films,” leaving software and any preconceived notions of the medium behind. The resulting list of 10 films show that artists are simply unbounded.

Note that this isn’t our first Flash Animation 10. Back in 2006, we listed the top 10 Most Influential films animated with Flash. Click here to find out who made the list.

The five judges who shared their time in judging the Flash Animation 10 come from a variety of backgrounds and physical locales. Many thanks to these fine folks, who lent their time and keen eyes to this event. Let’s meet them:

MEGAN O’NEILL
Megan O’Neill is the VP of Acquisitions & Development for Atom, a MTV Networks website of original series, animations and shorts. Besides acquisitions, she oversees the development and production of original series like Hellholes, Possum Death Spree, Aardman Animations’ Pib & Pog and Pes’ Game Over. Her acquisition of JibJab’s political spoof This Land resulted in tens of millions of plays online. Prior to joining Atom, she was the co-founder of Forefront Films, a ten-year old distributor of award-winning shorts worldwide. In 1998, she co-produced Forefront’s first feature film, Relax… It’s Just Sex, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and has been released in over 35 countries worldwide.

ANDREW GORDON
Andrew Gordon has been animating characters professionally for over 14 years. He joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1997 where he animated on A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and most recently, Ratatouille. The characters he has worked on include Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Gill, from Finding Nemo and Edna Mode, the costume designer in The Incredibles. Recently, he has supervised animation for Pixar’s new short film to be released with WALL•E. He is currently working on Toy Story 3. Prior to his work at Pixar, Andrew worked in the Looney Tunes division of Warner Brothers. He is a contributing teacher to Animation Mentor and a founding member of Spline Doctors, a blog/podcast dedicated to animation education.

WARD JENKINS
Ward is an animator and director currently living in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two kids. Formerly from Atlanta, Ward has worked at several award-winning studios such as LAIKA/house and Primal Screen, putting his unique style into various broadcast elements and commercials for the past 12 years. When not at work, Ward is a sought-after designer, illustrator and graffiti writer, evident on his blog, The Ward-O-Matic, where he writes about “art, animation and anything aesthetically pleasing to the eye.” Jenkins also contributes to the highly successful art, illustration, and comics blog, Drawn!

CHRIS FINNEGAN
Chris Finnegan is one of the founders of Screen Novelties, a Los Angeles studio that specializes in stop-motion animation. Chris and partners Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh have produced commercials for clients such as Nike and Hallmark and currently contribute segments to Cartoon Network shows Chowder and Flapjack. They are also developing their own television and feature projects.

RYAN HONEY
Ryan Honey is one of the owners of Buck and the creative director of the Los Angeles office. Founded in 2003, Buck is an award winning, multi-faceted design production company. Buck’s TV spot portfolio showcases world-class skills in motion graphics, live action, editorial, writing, design, animation, visual effects, music and sound design. Currently they have offices in New York and Los Angeles. Clients include Coca-Cola, Dominos, Toyota, Sprint, NBA, Hyundai, Fuel TV, Directv, American Express, Chrysler, Burger King, Comcast, Scion, Nike, GAP, Ford and MTV. Ryan earned a BA in Economics and has a certificate in multimedia from Vancouver Film School.

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.

Peter Elst, an Adobe Community Expert from Belgium, attended the recent Adobe MAX event in Chicago. He recorded this video below which shows a demonstration of what future versions of Flash might hold - namely IK. If you’re not familiar with that term, it stands for “inverse kinematics” or as it’s often called “bones.” Other 2D animation software packages, like Toon Boom Harmony, boast this feature, and Flash animators have been anxiously awaiting it for years. As Elst points out, the Adobe team who presented at MAX offered the caveat that this feature might not make into the next build or any future releases, but it’s cool to see it in action.

The presentation featured examples of non-keyframe animation, and plenty of other bells and whistles. Also check out Chris Georgenes’ blog to see cool new filters in the works.Thanks to Flash animator Tim Frost for the story tip.

Back in March of this year, Adobe Systems’ Richard Galvan moved from his spot as a Sr. Web Evangelist to his current spot as a Technical Product Manager for Flash. Galvan was at Macromedia before they were swallowed up by Adobe, and has since made a very public face within the design and animation community. Many of us in the animation community feel this increased attention is long overdue, and, as you’ll read below, Galvan couldn’t agree more. He recently came to Los Angeles, meeting with a variety of artists, and after sharing a drink with him at Flashfoward/Boston last week, it’s high time he and I got an interview going.

AARON: Congrats on the launch of Flash CS3. What were the main goals as your team set out to build this release?
RICHARD: The goal is always to create a ground breaking release of Flash that gives our users brand new ways to express themselves. In this case, integration was a big goal. We knew our customers wanted improved integration with Photoshop and Illustrator, so that was a big focus for this release. We’ve since received some great feedback about these features from the community.

AARON: Is there similar integration for After Effects due in coming versions?
RICHARD: We are always looking for ways to improve workflows between our tools. AE and Flash integration was improved for the current release of Production Premium and we will continue to work closely with the AE team to ensure that we build even greater time-saving workflow enhancements.

AARON: Flash CS3 is important to so many communities - website, interactive and game developers, video distributors, mobile teams, software developers, and of course character animators. Many in the animation community see ourselves as a ‘minority.’ Are the needs of the design animation animation community as important as the others mentioned above?
RICHARD: It is true that in pure numbers animators make it a smaller percentage of our users, but their influence on Flash is considerable. Flash is a tool to create graphically rich interactive experiences, but at its core Flash is still an animation tool. That won’t change. The concepts and techniques that animators use have been adopted by all of the other users you mention, and as animators evolve their techniques and tools I envision that the other users will expect Flash to keep up.

AARON: Have you heard feedback from the Adobe user-base to create an all-in-one design and animation tool?
RICHARD: Yes, I have heard that once or twice, but most of the time I hear people telling me not to make Flash more complicated than it already is. We have a lot of best-of-bread products at Adobe, and we believe that it’s best to give users the right tool for the job and not try to create the all-in-one super tool that would overwhelm most people.

AARON: There’s also been long-standing rumors in the character animation community that Flash and After Effects will somehow merge. Any truth to that rumor?
RICHARD: Merge? Rumor is the right word for that one. But continuing to work on getting the two products to be more tightly integrated is a goal of ours.

AARON: 3rd party developers have been creating rich plug-ins that further what can be accomplished in Flash - and many sell them for modest amounts. Subsequent releases of the software ship with functionality that often “put them out of business.” How do you manage this tricky relationship with your audience?
RICHARD: Your right, this is a bit tricky sometimes. We have to take into consideration the affect that adding certain features will have on our developer community and weigh that with the benefits to our users. Many times the reason for even adding such a feature is that it is a highly requested enhancement by our users.

AARON: 3D animation teams typically have coders on staff, creating custom plug-ins or writing lighting code. Do you foresee the 2D character animation community utilizing ActionScript 3.0 - in particular, the ActionScript 3.0 conversion functionality?
RICHARD: I hope so. ActionScript 3.0 is the foundation for a lot of the features in the Flash Player and although we do our best to expose all of those capabilities within the authoring tool it’s very difficult to provide visual tools for many of the API’s that exist. Learning and using AS3 is a great way of extending the possibilities of what one can do with Flash.

AARON: Was it a unanimous decision amongst the Flash team to rebuild the drawing tools in the Illustrator format?
RICHARD: This was more of a customer request. For some time now users have been commenting on the difference in the behavior of the tools. Now that Flash is part of Adobe we felt that consistency was important.

AARON: Has the overall vision of Flash’s value and future changed since Adobe purchased Macromedia?
RICHARD: No, it hasn’t changed but it hasn’t stopped evolving either. I still see Flash as the ultimate digital canvas to allow our users imagination to be visualized. But we can’t stop growing and we must keep up with all the changes constantly happening in our space.

AARON: Has the boot-time improved on CS3?
RICHARD: Yes. It’s a small improvement, but considering all the new libraries that we included in this release for PS, Illustrator and other integration support it’s a considerable improvement.

AARON: Animators stretch the timelines and file sizes of their Flash files to the maximum limits. Did CS3 add support for animators creating 12-minute episodes with tens of thousands of keyframes and 400mb files?
RICHARD: In every release of Flash we do our best to optimize and improve the performance of the tool, but honestly we don’t test the tool with those parameters. I have seen complex animation samples that go beyond 12 minutes, but I can’t say that the .fla file was in the range of 400MB. If you run into a specific example where the size of the project overwhelms Flash we would like to know the details. That way we can reproduce and test.

AARON: Have you had a look at the plug-ins offered at TrickOrScript.com, toonmonkey.com, 4gsw.com and animonger.com and if so, what’s your impression?
RICHARD: I have seen a few of the extensions that are available on the sites you mention. I have not been able to test all of them, but I have a seen many that are really handy. It’s encouraging to see the community enhance our tool with their own extensions and solve problems that we have not been able to yet. It’s also a way for us to see where we should spend some time in future releases, especially when these extensions are fixing things that customers feel Flash should be doing.

AARON: Does your team keep tabs on the competitive 2D animation software ToonBoom or Anime Studio?
RICHARD: Competitive research is an integral part of product management. If you are not keeping up with what others are doing you will find yourself behind the curve very quickly.

AARON: If an animator has a feature request they’d like to see incorporated into a future version of Flash, is there a way in which they can have their voice heard?
RICHARD: Absolutely, they can send their request to our wish list.

AARON: The animation community has their hopes set on new functionality in Flash 10 - like an Illustrator-style customizable brush tool, the ability to warp symbols or the ability to mask with gradients. Do you feel like our community’s needs align with the greater Flash user-group?
RICHARD: I don’t want to give away too much here, but I’ll just say that I really think that the animation community will be very happy when they finally see what we have in store for them.

AARON: Thanks, Richard.