Animating a maple seedling.

Hurtling towards the deadline in two weeks, but I want to share my process for animating a falling maple seed in Adobe Flash.

There are different kinds of animation to consider in the art form: acting, action, and motion. Usually we spring from what we know, the laws of physics, gravity and so on - animators can be true to reality, or really move away from it. In this case, I didn't want to go too far, but I also didn't want it to be stiff or obviously roto-scoped (traced from live-action). And of course, it has to fit with my signature style, which is visually simple. And supposedly effortless. Haw haw haw.

Although the animation plays along the timeline, I stacked the frames here and left the pretty onion skins so you can see how I mapped it out. Using two ellipses as path-of-action guide, I created a single drawing of a maple seed and deformed it in a series of key frames.  This spinning loop sits in a dedicated symbol, which I then animated fluttering downward on the main timeline.

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Save as.

WARNING: Animator speak.

Two nights ago I had an animation disaster: while working in Flash CS5 on a commissioned film, the file suddenly corrupted. It refused to revert so I forced close and reopened it. When I checked it there was a ton of missing body parts and elements, every symbol had doubled its number of layers and extended one layer for twice as many frames. FREAKY.

Poor Nonna lost her knickers.

To make matters worse, the doubling was causing the file to choke making it super difficult to do anything. I’m talking "click… (wait 5 seconds) …object selected". And then it would freeze, "file not responding". Ugh.

I thought I was going to puke.

WTF?

To those of you who said “don’t you back up?” Of course I fucking back up, ffs. I’m not an idiot, geez. Mostly. I save every few seconds, and there's a raid automagically backing everything up in case one of my drives dies. But I hadn't actually saved as in a while...the earlier version from a few days before proved less than useful because I just work so dang fast yawl. Goddammit

To the three animators who reached out to me privately to offer assistance with the winrar extension fix, thank-you so much. Kiyoshi, Antonio, Jason, it really meant a lot to me that you speak the same language as me. That fix didn’t work in this particular case though.

So I did what I always do in times of great need: I texted The Huz (blissfully away camping in the Tadoussac) and I cried. He cooly reminded me that I could always decompile the latest swf render. Which I had backed up into my approvals folder. HURRAH for not being completely stupid!

If you work in Flash you probably already know about Sothink Decompiler. It basically takes your swf render and backwards-engineers it to give you a “functional” Flash file. And by “functional” I mean scrambled beyond recognition. I used it and all the symbol names in the library have been obliterated and replaced by ‘shapes’ in a million layers on the main timeline. What was once named “donkey” is now exploded into shapes 253, 254, and 255. And there are hundreds and hundreds of shapes! 

But fear not. I am brave.

Delving into my corrupted Flash file I began deleting the doubled layers. I started with the cycles that were re-used in multiple characters, like the dancing legs, running legs and so on. When the file began behaving a little better, I systematically checked for missing body parts, sourced the correct shape in the decompiled Flash file, and copy pasted it into the correct symbol in the corrupted file.

Relief.

I just finished all that and restored my file completely. It took two days. The moral of the story is to 'save as' every couple of hours. Save as, motherfuckers! It could save your ass. Hee haw.

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Meet my font.

For a long time, The Huz has been trying to convince me to make a font. I just never had time. I still don't have time.

But I'm building the Kindle version of PickleWeasel Picture Riddles (book 1) and I want it to have popups - super fun, right? But the popups are text based. So it became an unavoidable necessity.

How to make a font? It was a bit of a hack getting this font made; the look of my line comes from a certain blobbiness in Flash. I've tried to reproduce it in other apps and programs and it's never quite right.

But to get from Flash to the FontLab meant jumping through several hoops including backwards saving from Flash CS5 to CS4 to CS3, going from W7 to MAC to XP on different machines. Then output to Illustrator and finally to Eps, which could be imported into FontLab.

And speaking of time, this font is going to save me tons. Thanks to The Huz!

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The End of the World! Almost.

The End of the World came early for me...at least that's what it felt like. This afternoon I was happily animating away on my PickleWeasel app promo-demo when Adobe Flash started being buggy. This happens with software right? I saved, closed the file and re-opened it a few minutes later.

I saw this:

Flash can not parse this document? Ack. My file was corrupt. A creeping terror swept through me and the blood drained out of my face. I felt like every minor chord in the Universe was ringing dissonance in the depths of my soul. I couldn't even make a fist. Those Mayans!

I'd been working for a week on this animation, so to have the file corrupted was like losing a piece of my heart. Something I'd created was gone.

I turned to Twitter and asked for help. And Twitter delivered! So many fabulous people made suggestions and offered to help. I also reached out to @Adobe hoping they would respond.

This is kinda technical, but The Huz managed to decompile the .swf of rendered "work-in-progress" animation, which was all I had left. It was a partial success; the decompiled file looked nothing like my original timeline. Working in Flash is so...personal. I would have had to do quite a bit of slogging to work with it in that state.

A few minutes later, @Adobe did come through on Twitter. They put me on to @Adobe_Care who pointed me in the right direction. I fixed my Flash file and now I'm happily animating away.

Relief! It's not the End of the World until tomorrow! Thanks Twitter.

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