studio blog

In the first scene in the new short that we’re animating, Dood gets spun (by Hand, natch) in a hamster wheel. At first he tries to keep up with the rotation, but it soon becomes too much for him, and he ends up knocked around inside the whirling wheel.

Because we work in Flash, a lot of the animation that we do is simplified through the use of ‘Symbols.’ This means that rather than draw something fresh on every frame, we are moving around a single drawing. This makes the work simpler, and eliminates some of the need for clean-up.

A scene like this one, in which Dood is bounced around so much, really doesn’t have the option of symbol-use, because the motion is so erratic and there is so much tumbling going on. As a result, the majority of animation in this scene will be freshly drawn. The clean-up will be a lot more intensive than if we had been able to use Symbols, but the animation will be a lot more fun - both more fun to watch AND more fun to animate.