Over the weekend, I participated in Six Point Harness Studios‘ ‘Flash Animation Essentials’ class, where I gave my take on the state of the industry. It was great to see so many talented artists interested in the topic, and they were rightfully treated to great presentations by Eric Pringle and Greg Franklin.

A special thanks to Ajay Karat for passing along this photo from my session.

This, the fourth Cold, Hard Flashback, focuses on the Flash animation work from the Spumco gang. Sure, we took the wayback machine off to John K land in the 1st Flashback, but when, my friends, can ever have too much Spumco? Spumco, the now dormant animation pioneer, was early out of the Flash animation gate, delivering The Goddamn George Liquor Program in 1999, and a few wacky Hanna Barbera remakes that we’ll get to eventually.

The Spumco team also created a hysterical music video for Tenacious D’s ‘F*ck Her Gently.’

The video was directed by Gabe Swarr, and it featured work by a laundry list of the new generation of Hollywood animation talent. Gabe & Fred Gonzales recently worked on Disney’s ‘The Buzz on Maggie’; Derrick Wyatt & Ben Jones who recently finished up their 4th season on ‘Teen Titans’; Ray Morelli who I’ve worked with for a few years on various Flash projects; Tony Mora, who’s at Mike Young, and Matt Danner who I’m currently working with on ‘Coconut Fred.’ They all make cameo appearances in the opening camera descent into hell. The video is perhaps clunky by today’s standards, but you can’t deny the hysterical posing, beautiful layouts and clever and economic use of the software. I highly recommend you turn down your speakers at work, as ‘F*ck Her Gently’ is not in the least bit suitable for work.

The Spumco artists eventually disbanded, and in 2001 two talented youths by the name of Eric Pringle, who’s Animation Director over on ‘Fosters’ and Matt Danner started toiling on their own project. Now, to fully appreciate this short, you should familiarize yourself with a man by the name of Cal Worthington. Cal is southern-California-based car dealer who hosted a series of fairly humorous commercials featuring a ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’ reworking. Now Pringle and Danner twisted this reworking even further, and came up with ‘PussyCow.’

It’s infectious, perverted and it features what I believe is the world’s first ‘nun punch.’ Matt does most, if not all of the voices, and he and Pringle are responsible for the animation, which shows hints of their Spumco upbringing. Matt & Pringle were part of Nebulous Films at the time, who ended up producing several hundred PussyCow dolls, and they’re now rare collectors items I occasionally see in offices around town. As the saying goes: “He’s half pussy, half cow….all good!” And don’t miss the recently released ‘PussyCow’ bonus clips, unfinished shots from the original short.

Eric Pringle is currently a Flash Director on ‘Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends,’ working out of Cartoon Network in Burbank, California. He’s amongst the group of pioneers who, 5 years ago, helped Flash animation rise out of the shadows of crappy, online shorts. He worked on the first season of ‘Mucha Lucha’ and then went on to give birth, along with Matt Danner, to his own short, ‘Go! Go! Moba Boy!’ which won the first season of Warner Bros. Cartoon Monsoon competition. His efforts were rewarded last year with an Annie nomination for his work on an episode of ‘Fosters.’ His attention to detail and eye for quality animation has helped many artists rise to the challenge, and that’s exactly what today’s post is about.

On his own dime, Eric, or as he’s known by his friends ‘Pringle,’ has created a home-brew Flash class, which outlines many of the standard Flash animation methods used around the world, but also several that have been developed by he and his co-workers. For instance, Pringle created ‘The Pringle,’ which might not make your animation any better, but it will keep you from tossing your monitor out a window.

‘The Pringle’ rose out of necessity. Often times, animators want to ‘flatten’ an element on their timeline. Whether it’s a head-comp or an entire character, it’s often much easier to compress many layers into a single symbol, so these elements can be manipulated as a group. It also makes for a leaner, cleaner workspace. Artists can use folders to clean up their workspace, but folders don’t offer the ability to manipulate the contents as a single graphic or movie clip. Flash artists have been ‘flattening’ their work for years, but ‘The Pringle’ allows you to do it much quicker and with perfect accuracy.

Pringle was nice enough to lend Cold, Hold Flash his chapter on ‘The Pringle,’ which we now share with you. (Okay, now is the time where everyone should go into the Comments section and start begging Pringle to give us more chapters from his Flash book. Not now! He’s watching. Okay, now).

AWN recently posted an excellent article highlighting trends and projections about Flash animation production, a long overdue follow-up to AWN’s Flash article in their November 2003 issue. For his lengthy article, Greg Singer assembled a veritable who’s who of Flash big wigs in the LA area, with a few exceptions, in particular ‘Foster’s’ Eric Pringle, who was just nominated for Best TV Director at the Annie Awards, and Jorge Gutierrez, who’s currently at Disney TV Animation. My good friends at Six Point Harness were rightfully discussed at length, with insightful quotes from bossman, Brendan Burch. Alright, enough name-dropping. Greg’s article hits all the high notes, discussing myths, budget numbers, and the future of Flash production. I’ve assembled my favorite pull quotes, but you must simply read the whole thing – it’s just that good.

People do not generally think of Flash animation in flattering ways. A common assumption is that Flash animation is simple and crude, both in terms of its content and execution. As one artist observed, “Using Flash is like using a baseball bat to play golf. It works, it’s about the right size, it does what you want it to do, but it’s not exactly what it’s supposed to be.”

With television animation averaging about $300,000 per episode these days, the idea that Flash can produce shows more inexpensively is somewhat of a myth. However, with a comparable budget and in-house creative oversight, Flash animation at the bigger studios is being produced on an expeditious delivery schedule. Whereas a typical 22-minute television show may have eight weeks for animation, on Foster’s — with half of its episodes animated in Burbank, California at Cartoon Network, and the remaining half in Dublin, Ireland at Boulder Media — the schedule has been abbreviated to a brisk four weeks.

Craig Kellman… animation director on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends… says, “The pre-production artwork is created in Illustrator, and so all of the files are already vectorized. We import them directly into Flash, and bend and stretch them at will. To save time, we can use Illustrator to help symbolize assets or we can build elements in Flash and bring them into Illustrator, for example, to apply brush strokes on characters.”

Aaron Augenblick says… “People talk about the Flash look of things, but it really is a platform where you could do a lot of different things: the typical Flash, vectory look with thick and thin lines; or the no-line look of Foster’s; or manipulating photographs like cut-out animation. It’s a fun program in that way.”

(‘Foster’s’ Mike) Moon says, “Honestly, I’m not seeing a lot of limitations. The animators are doing such brilliant work. At this point in time, I can’t imagine producing a 2D show not somehow using this process, or a slight modification of this process. I’m sold. Obviously there are issues I would change, little production issues, but creatively, what we’re doing now, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

“We try to erase the line between Flash and traditional. People call it Flash animation, and are expecting some kind of Flash animation, but it’s not the case with us. You’re going to get something that’s well animated.” (Brendan Burch)