Back in February, CHF posted an animated music video brought to life by Bernard Derriman, the artist behind Arj & Poopy. The video was created for Big Green Rabbit, “a children’s multimedia lifestyle brand dedicated to reducing childhood obesity and connecting children and nature.”

Enjoy The Iguana Song, which was animated in Toon Boom Solo.

Welcome back to Brackenwood! Below is the last of the three-part Cold, Hard Flash interview with Adam Phillips, Mayor of Brackenwood. In this section, we learn about Adam’s next Brackenwood installment, his thoughts on other vector-based animation software, and what DVDs are in his player.

AARON SIMPSON: How’s ‘Waterlollies,’ your most recent ‘Brackenwood’ short, coming along?
ADAM PHILLIPS: Right now it’s quite slow, but occasionally I’ll get a free day and pound out a few scenes. I have most of it storyboarded now, but every now and again when I’m tired of storyboarding, I’ll create a few backgrounds and animation and get a scene or two working in full colour. (follow this link and scroll to the bottom to see a sneak preview)

AARON: Are you experimenting with any new types of effects animation in ‘Waterlollies?’
ADAM: There are a couple of new scripting ideas that I’d like to discuss with Sham for this new movie. The problem with scripted effects though, is that they only work in the Flash Player. To get those effects working for a DVD or video, they need to be created manually (unless we can figure out a way to ‘bake’ the simulation, like in Maya).

AARON: How long is the ‘Brackenwood’ title sequence going to be?
ADAM: I’m guessing between 30 and 40 seconds. I’m also determined to win awards with it, just like ‘Invader Zim’ did with their title sequence.

AARON: Have you considered assembling your ‘Brackenwood’ shorts into a DVD compilation?
ADAM: Right now, there’s not enough episodes to make a decent length DVD. In fact, if you include ‘hitchHiker’ 1 and 2, there’s only about 35 minutes of viewing. I’d hate to release something like that ‘cos I feel I’d be cheating the audience. Once I have about 8 ‘Brackenwood’ episodes, I’ll pad it with special features and really make it worth the buy.

AARON: Have you ever considered utilizing other 2D software packages like Toon Boom, Moho, Toonz and Digicel’s Flipbook?
ADAM: I have thought about using USAnimation, the Tab and Moho. In fact, in TGSNT2 I won both ToonBoom and the Tab, so I can now explore their capabilities if I need to. I can just see myself reverting back to Flash anyway, because it’s usually quicker than learning a new program. If only I had more hours in the day…

AARON: You’re practically royalty in the Newgrounds.com universe. How has your internet profile changed since you started posting your shorts there?
ADAM: Dramatically. The popularity of ‘hitchHiker,’ ‘Bitey’ and ‘Brackenwood’ just exploded after posting them on Newgrounds, and thanks to that, the traffic hitting my site has skyrocketed in the past couple of years. This has finally made it possible for me to earn money from the site, which was a factor in my decision to quit Disney.

AARON: You’ve mentioned before that you enjoy playing Unreal Tournament 2004 – what other video games do you enjoy?
ADAM: I love RPGs and I love First Person Shooters (particularly multiplayer). I particularly love FPS RPGs, like Morrowind and Gothic II.

While RPGs are my favourite, First Person Shooters are great when I want a half-hour break from animation. You can’t play an RPG for just half hour.

In my games library I have Unreal (the original), Wheel of Time, Gothic II, Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, Splinter Cell, Morrowind, Quake 3 Arena, Doom 3, Deus Ex 1 and 2… blah blah blah.

AARON: What is currently playing in your DVD player?
ADAM: ‘Big Train,’ series 1 and 2!! That’s a sketch comedy show from the U.K. Brilliant.

AARON: Which upcoming animated feature are you most looking forward too?
ADAM: I’m really looking forward to ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ ‘cos I do like Miyazaki (probably not hard to see that in my work).

AARON: The recent batch of Disney’s animated feature sequels (in particular ‘Lion King 1 1/2′ and ‘Return to Neverland’) have been receiving a great deal of praise. To what do you attribute this increased appreciation?
ADAM: Both of those movies were animated at the Sydney studio which, at the time was Disney’s last remaining DTV (direct-to-video) studio. Our Canadian and Japanese counterparts were shut down, and as a result the Sydney studio got more money, more projects (in fact, all projects) and more people as artists and animators followed the work down to Australia.

The Australian director for ‘Lion King 1.5,’ Ryan O’Loughlin is an amazingly talented animator and a personal friend of mine. I attribute the success of the third ‘Lion King’ movie to his incredible attention to detail and his hard work in getting exactly what he wanted on screen.

I feel the same way about ‘Return to Neverland,’ where the story was kinda yuck and quite boring until director Kevin Lima was brought on board to make it all better. His changes made the audience care about the characters, where before, nobody gave a flying rat’s arse about what happened to Jane. In fact, she was a complete bitch. Early in the project, before Kevin Lima came on board, I hoped she would die in one of my scenes. One of the great things about working in FX is that you usually get to kill off the bad guys. I killed quite a few Disney bad-guys in my FX scenes – Zira, Forté, Morgana, the big bald guy whats-his-name in ‘Aladdin and the King of Thieves.’ I almost managed to kill the Mouse himself in ‘The Three Musketeers,’ but Goofy and Donald saved him.

Where was I? Oh yeah – directors like Ryan O’Loughlin (‘Lion King 1.5′) Kevin Peaty (‘The Three Musketeers’) and Kevin Lima (‘Return to Neverland’) make the audience care about the story and the characters. Those guys see the value of creating characters and stories that people won’t forget as soon as the credits roll.

AARON: Do you have any advice to animation students graduation this Spring?
ADAM: If you want success in animation, keep doing it until you’re tired of it, then do it some more. The thing that separates amateur from expert is experience and you only gain experience by doing. The more you animate, the better you’ll get, because improvement is an almost guaranteed side-effect of experience. Treat every mistake or bad drawing as a lesson learned, and in time your animation will reflect your level of commitment.

AARON: Thanks, Adam. Extremely interesting stuff. Congratulations on your awards this year, and best of luck on ‘Waterlollies.’ Can’t wait to see it!

We’re back with the second half of the Cold, Hard Flash interview with Campbell MacKinlay, the Director/Writer of ‘Doodlez,’ the short-form series currently airing on TeleTOON in Canada and Nicktoons in the States. Let’s see what Campbell has to say about alternatives to Flash, his work with Harry Knowles and which artists make him want to start doodling.

AARON: Beyond Flash, what other software does your team use to create ‘Doodlez’?
We compile our shows in Final Cut Pro, and run the final product through After Effects where we add a very slight blur in order to take a little bit of the digital edge off of everything. We try to do anything we can in order to avoid the dreaded “Flashy-ness.”

But truly, the entire production would grind to a halt were it not for one piece of software: Tetris.

AARON: Do you and your team use Flash to create the ‘Doodlez’ animatics?
CAMPBELL: Yes. Our pipeline runs almost exclusively through Flash. We have created interconnected template files for storyboards, animatics and layouts, so that each can be automatically populated by copy-pasting common symbols (and accepting the replacement) from the previous step.

As one might imagine, timing is a really important issue for the show, and it is one that is revisited throughout the process. As we timed out the animatics, we would often add antics and settles, by squashing and stretching the storyboard poses, which would result in a further defined blueprint to follow.

Also on the issue of timing, during the first season we found that the animators had a tendency to overrun the 2-minute episode limit, so that we had to create a final step in which we would need to cut the show to time.

As a result, in the second season, I would time the shorts out to 1 minute 45 seconds, leaving the animators a bank of 10 seconds to withdraw from as they needed, and myself 5 seconds more to fill out the show when it was complete. Adding time is a pleasure, while cutting is a nightmare, especially when the pacing of the show has such a tendency to add congestion.

AARON: Have you considered using any other vector-based software to animate ‘Doodlez?’
CAMPBELL: I think that any animation studio that hopes to survive needs to constantly keep their eyes and ears open. At Trapeze, we try to consider every viable option for getting our work onscreen. We don’t want to be left behind the curve, because of an allegiance to specific software, if something else appears that is superior to it. To this end, we’ve had a few conversations with Toon Boom at various stages about what their software can accomplish.

Until recently, Toon Boom’s product has not been compelling enough for us to consider making the change from Flash. However, we’ve recently had a demonstration of the capabilities of its newest iteration, Harmony, and were VERY impressed. Some of the features of this software quite simply blew us away.

But currently, its cost per seat is absurdly prohibitive, so it seems that we’ll have to be pinning all our hopes on the long-anticipated release of 8-ball for the time being. Hopefully, Flash has been paying attention to what its competitors and other vector-based programs such as Moho and Expression3 have been doing, and do their best to integrate similar features into this new release. Flash artists have waited a long time for an upgrade that focuses on our needs, so I certainly hope it’s worth it.

AARON: What’s the story behind those animated GIFs you did for Ain’t It Cool News?
CAMPBELL: The story is that I liked the site, and thought I saw an opportunity to contribute something. So I cooked up a quick animation of Harry with the little secondary Alien mouth (from Alien) popping out of his mouth and snapping.

He dug it, so I kept doing them and he kept posting them. When I stopped doing them I had completed 182 of them, a bunch of random illustrations, bumpers for the aintitcooltv pilot, and two animated shorts that opened the Butt-Numb-A-Thon 2 and 3 film festivals. Since I stopped, he’s just been cycling through the existing ones (though 3 or 4 were submitted by other guys).

AARON: What animators and artists do you draw inspiration from?
CAMPBELL: Most closely connected to inspiring ‘Doodlez’ are the folks behind the ‘Looney Tunes,’ (especially Clampett and Avery) and the DePatie-Freleng ‘Pink Panther,’ Antonio Prohias for ‘Spy Vs. Spy,’ and ‘La Linea,’ aka the line-guy featured on ‘The Great Space Coaster’ which was created by Osvaldo Cavandoli.

AARON: What animated programs are on your watch list?
CAMPBELL: ‘PEEP and the Big Wide World!’ Man, that’s a good show. My one year-old daughter hipped me to this show, but don’t discount it based on its preschool credentials. It’s sweet and simple, but very funny, with characters that are super-appealing and somehow manage to seem immediately familiar without ripping off anybody. Also, unless I am VERY mistaken, it’s Flash. (Editor: It is.)

AARON: Do you follow any Flash-animated web-series?
CAMPBELL: Sadly, I don’t. But around the time Icebox went down, I became too busy to keep track of much and tuned out. But, as I am not above this sort of thing, I will take this as an opportunity to plug the webisodes at jinglebelle.com and the corner animation I did for aintitcoolnews.com both of which were created exclusively in Flash, and mostly before I had the even the most remote idea of how to use the thing.

AARON: What animated DVDs are you currently playing?
CAMPBELL: Tom & Jerry, Ren & Stimpy, Samurai Jack, and Porco Rosso.

Beyond DVD, I recently traded for a 16th generation-VHS-copy of the John K. run on Mighty Mouse, which I am digging in a big, bad way.

AARON: Thanks, Campbell. I really appreciate your thoughtful answers and your inspirational work on ‘Doodlez.’ Best of luck with the upcoming episodes!