Click on over and see/hear Foul Owl Karaoke – a Flash-animated music visualizer that features stylized character moving to the beats. The experience was created by Das Plankton who picked up a nomination at this year’s Flashforward Film Festival in San Francisco.

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Flashforward Austin is not all that far away. Kicking off on Monday, September 11th, and running through Thursday the 14th, Flashforward will again host “the largest International Flash-related film festival on the planet,” according to the website. The event is 16th for the Lynda.com gang, who acquired full ownership of the event last year. It’s the first time the event will be held in Austin, and we’ll see if this great city can top the enormous turnout in Seattle – which boasted 1,500 attendees.

I’ll be speaking in Room 2 on Wednesday starting at 1:30pm. The session title is a mouthful – “Flash Animation: From One Computer to a Million Screens.” Here’s my attempt at writing in the third person:

JibJab’’s Animation Producer, Aaron Simpson, explains how a small studio or an independent animator can reach a global audience. See JibJab’s Flash®-animated shorts, and others from around the world, then hear their unique stories of viral distribution. Aaron, the editor of coldhardflash.com, will also illustrate popular techniques that are being used at animation studios, and demonstrate several plugins that are re-shaping the Flash animator’s workspace.

My friend and co-founder of JibJab Media, Evan Spiridellis, will also be on hand. He’ll kick off his session titled “Cut, Paste, Animate: Collage Animation” at 10:45am on Wednesday.

And don’t forget to nominate your favorite Flash project for the Flashforward Film Festival. It’s free to nominate and you’ve got until June 23rd.

Dave Wolfe has taken matters into his own hands. Dave is an LA-based Flash animator whose gone and created three Flash extensions, or custom commands, that he’s offering to the Flash community for free. After spending some time last week at Flashforward, it’s become all too clear that the Dave Wolfe’s and the Warren Fuller’s of the world are going to advance the software for our community FAR more than the guys at Adobe/Macromedia. That’s not to say that the advances in Flash 8 aren’t interesting and somewhat useful, but we’re just never going to get the type of detailed animation-specific tools from a development team that’s more focused on interactive websites.

So with that said, here’s Dave’s extensions. You’ll need to have Macromedia’s Extension Manager 1.6 or later to install (which comes with Flash 8, but earlier versions need to download). Once you download these, you just double-click the mxp files (the three below) in Extension Manager and off you go. Dave recommends that you tinker with your keyboard shortcuts once you install, because there’s a bug in Flash that screws these up when you install custom commands. Just open the keyboard shortcut panel and click ‘OK.’ The shortcuts should go back to their proper places.

(right-click or control-click on these and ’save as’)1. LayerColor – This will let you change the outline color for selected layers all at the same time instead of changing the color one at a time in the layer properties panel.

2. NewAnimClip – This will create a new empty symbol on a new layer, registered to the stage. If you have an animation clip for a character and you decide you want to nest it inside a symbol, the old way would be to copy all the frames, insert a new symbol, paste the frames, then drag that symbol onto the stage and try to line it up. With this extension, all you have to do is copy or cut the frames, run the NewAnimClip command, and then paste the frames. The symbol is already on the stage and correctly registered.

3. Tween2Keys – This works like ‘convert to keyframes,’ but it does it on two’s instead of one’s. You have to be careful with this one, as Dave tried to come up with a way to make it actually create keyframes on every other frame, but each way he came up with to do that ruined the motion tween. So what this actually does is use Flash’s convert to keyframes command first, then it removes any tweens, then it clears every other keyframe. Since you’re physically removing keyframes there is the potential to accidentally clear a keyframe that you want, so make sure that any of the selected frames do not have keyframes on 1’s or they will get cleared. To convert your tween to two’s, select the first keyframe and last keyframe in the motion tween (this will work for multiple layers) and run the command. For large amounts of frames it may take a few seconds for the script.

These are all accessed from the Commands menu in Flash MX 2004 or 8, and you can assign a keyboard shortcut to them from the Edit menu.

Great work, Dave. I’m assuming the audience will have plenty of ideas for your next batch of extensions. Evan Spiridellis and I recently challenged the Macromedia team to create a Warp Symbol tool (might work like a ‘Smart Object’ in Photoshop CS2), but perhaps that can happen by way of an extension. Or what about a global color palette that would allow for asset-specific color. Or the ability to build custom line types – so many Flash teams do this stuff in Illustrator, and I hear it’s possible to build these right into Flash itself. Anyone else?

Last week, Evan Spiridellis and I spoke at the 2006 Flashforward Conference, an event produced by Lynda.com. The title of our session was JibJab’s Animation Process and How a Small Studio Can Reach a Big Audience, and we spoke for just over an hour. Evan walked the audience through the JibJab animation process – from animatic to animation to finished product. I presented several animators and small teams that are reaching big audiences, first which was JibJab, who had over 80 million people watch ‘This Land‘ and ‘Good to be in DC!‘ during the 2004 election. Here’s the slides from my presentation detailing JibJab’s recent successes.

Back then, it was really 2 guys doing it all, and this is the story I repeated many times over during the night.

Next I spoke about Jennifer Shiman and her ‘30 Second Bunnies Theatre,’ the Flash-animated series currently airing on Starz! on Demand. As many of you know from reading the CHF interview with Jennifer, she pretty much a one-woman band, writing, animating, and directing alone, and she gets over 1.8 million unique views a month at her angryalien.com site.

Amanita Design was the next studio featured. This 2-man shop out of Brno, Czech Republic is creating viral click-along games like Samorost 2 and linear music videos with a very small team. Jakub Dvorsky, the founder, gets over 500,000 unique views a month at his site.

Weebls-stuff.com is the playground for Weebl, the British animator. He and a small cadre of animators create ‘Weebl & Bob’ and other funny series like ‘Magical Trevor.’ They get a staggering number of cartoon views every month – over 5 million!

Bernard Derriman animated the music video for TISM’s ‘Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me,’ which went on to become a hugely viral video. He animates alone, and he gets over 50,000 unique visitors to his site, arjandpoopy.com, every month. I completely missed posting about Bernard’s holiday ‘Arj and Poopy’ episode, but you can still see it here.

Adam Phillips, who happens to be an old working buddy of Bernard’s, won his 3rd Flashforward festival trophy for his Flash-animated short ‘littleFoot.’ He too is a one-man Flash army, writing, directing and barely sleeping while crafting his Brackenwood series. In a good month, he gets over 300,000 unique visitors to his site.

James Farr, the creator of ‘Xombie,’ is currently in production on a direct-to-DVD feature version of his Flash-animated series. All by his lonesome, deep in the heart of Tulsa, Oklahoma, James has written, animated and produced 7 online ‘Xombie’ shorts, and now he’s teamed up with Wetsand animation to create the long-form version. He has over 1 million subscribers to his ‘Xombie’ mailing list.

Laith Bahrani’s ‘Low Morale’ series brought down the house during our presentation. We screened episode 9, and the crowd went nuts. Very funny stuff. Laith is the sole animator on his shorts, and he’s welcomed over 800,000 visitors to his site since 2004.

And last, but not least, we talked about ‘Queer Duck: The Movie’ which is due to wrap production sometime soon. It’s a Flash-animated feature project penned by Mike Reiss, a Simpsons writer, and Xeth Feinberg is heading up the animation effort. He’s working with a team that’s usually smaller than 10, and he’s been in production since last summer.

While it’s not always about the size of the audience, it’s still impressive to see so few reaching so many. Thanks to everyone for contributing to our presentation, and to Lynda Weinman (of Lynda.com) for hosting us up in Seattle.

The finalists in the Cartoon competition have been announced for the 14th Flash Film Festival, an online competition. The awards are part of Flashforward2005, and the big winner will be crowned on July 7th in The New Yorker Hotel. The four films in the competition are:

Learn Self Defense
by Chris Harding
Chris is a Cold, Hard Flash regular, and his career and techniques were chronicled back in February of this year. Chris offers this synopsis of the 5-minute ‘Learn Self Defense’ on his website – “After being brutally attacked in an alley, George decides he must learn to protect himself. A cocksure narrator walks him through five practical lessons of self-defense for the citizen on the go– or nation-state on the rampage!” This short is not available on the web, but Chris gave me an opportunity to watch the film and it’s simply excellent. ‘Learn Self Defence’ is slick, stylized and irreverently funny. Check out clips on Chris’ site, and while you’re there Coming into the Flash Film Festival, Chris is on a roll, having just won the Best of the Fest award at the 2005 Kansas City Filmmakers’ Jubilee.

The Adventures of Mr. Coo
by Nacho Rodriguez
Nacho lives in Barcelona, Spain, and he’s animated one of the most entertaining Flash shorts in recent memory. Mr. Coo, a large-nosed, shape-shifting blob, finds himself being chases by his own paper airplane, a savage chair and a toilet that acts more like a xerox machine. There’s an enormously high drawing count in ‘The Adventures of Mr. Coo,’ and it’s almost hard to believe it was all animated by one man. The 25-year old Rodriguez also has extremely strong timing and imagination – he’s essentially Spain’s answer to animation autuers like Don Hertzfeldt and Bill Plympton. I simply love this short, and I can’t wait to see the next in the series, which is reportedly under way.

Manege Frei
by Dyrdee
‘Manege Frei’ is a contemplative Flash short that acts as a metaphor for what we want and what we actually end up doing to get it. ‘Manege Frei’ was animated at the German Urban Design and Communicatiosn company Dyrdee. It’s beautifully designed, and animated quite elaborately. The painted bitmap grass texture adds a nice touch, and the linework is gorgeous. The lighting, the shadows, the color palette – there’s so much to love, I recommend you just stop reading this now and watch.

Taggerz
by Jamie Cason
‘Taggerz’ is an episodic Flash-animated project that follows the Ruffneck Crew, a group of UK graffiti artists. The website offers the following tag – “When your crew is your family, you better hope they’ve got your back.” ‘Taggerz’ is behind a firewall on the BBC site, but it only takes a minute to sign-up, and a working email doesn’t seem to be neccessary.

Now that you’ve watched them all, head on over to the Flash Film Festival site and vote on your favorite. Best of luck to all in the competition.