Going Gaga for Flash animation
I’ve been advising a motion graphics artist in the creation of an ongoing series of topical animations designed to simulate a moving comic strip and containing topical references to celebrities and their lives.
Designer Debra Danu Matthews at Artistic Navigator came up with the idea of the Celebrity Toy Chest after being commissioned to produce cartoon animations based upon Baddiel & Skinner’s World Cup 2010 podcasts for Absolute Radio. For that series, Absolute provided an short edited audio track distilled from that week’s radio show; Debi’s task was to produce a topical animation on a rapid 24-hour turnaround that could be published as a video podcast by the station. It wasn’t easy – but we got there and the client was happy!
My role, in that context as it is in this, was to take Debi’s Adobe Flash animations, convert them to an editable full-HD video format (1920×1080) and then synchronise Stevie Martin’s audio tracks before producing an output master and sub-master as 1080p and 720p respectively. Finished 720p files are then uploaded to YouTube from where embed feeds are then derived.
Here’s the most recent animation in which some inner secrets relating to Lady Gaga’s meteoric rise to fame are revealed.
Platform-Agnostic output formatting
These days, of course, it’s important to ensure that animation which starts out as Adobe Flash is formatted in a manner appropriate to the whole range of display devices – ranging from standard web to iPads, iPhones, Android and Windows devices. That’s why MPEG-4/H.264 was chosen as the final export format.
If you have similar requirements for a workflow that produces output suitable for an ever-widening range of display devices, then please Contact me asap!