We are finaly done with our presentation for Adobe ‘Creating Accessible Sites in Flash’! Produced by Knowbility and made for Adobe, this presentation gives an overview of all the different things you can do to make Flash accessible for users with a visual, hearing or mobility impairment.

The presentation itself is fully accessible, with keyboard shortcuts, closed captioning and audio descriptions, written by Knowbility. The piece will be hosted on the Adobe website.

Stay tuned for the final URL!

Playing around with the logo for Jelly Telly, a new Christian children’s site. This Flash was output for video at 720×405, 16:9 widescreen. Check out the Jelly Telly website! www.jellytelly.com

I am taking this great character design course at Schoolism.com, with Stephen Silver as mentor. (He designed Kim Possible). We have just had our second class, which was about how to get ‘loose’ in our drawings. Silver mentioned several influences, including Gerald Scarfe in Hercules during the class. Since I own the book ‘The Art of Hercules’ the name sounded familiar and I looked it up. I never realized the influence that Scarfe had on the movie!

With his calligraphic drawings, Scarfe helped make the style of Hercules more flowing and stylistic rather than the classic ‘fluffy’ Disney look. In the style guide for the movie, they define what they called the ‘Scarfe Line’, a swoop of a line with a sudden reversal. Ears are made up of swoops or scallops, so are noses, eyes, brows and overal body shapes. They call it the ‘Scarfe Powerswoop’. Here are a few examples that I did in Illustrator:

So in order to get ‘loose’ I draw a full page of scarfed hands, and bodies, to warm up, and it really helps. You should try it! Send me a link to all your scarfed drawings!

We have just registered for the Best in the SW conference, in Albuquerque New Mexico! Finally a conference that focuses on the art of Flash animation, not just motion graphics.

The conference is full of great speakers such as Flash animators Phil Nibbelink, Silvia Pompei and Chris Georgenes. There will be a premiere movie event for Romeo and Juliet, the first all Flash movie. The conference hosts pre-conference and post conference workshops as well. We signed up for a workshop on Character Development Disney style in Flash with Phil Nibbelink.

There are parties, events and excursions to animation studios and many more networking events. Go here to find out more about the conference: http://www.bestinthesw.com/ Feel free to use the promo code EATON to receive a $25 discount on your registration. I hope to see you there!

We are in this quarters edition of Ability Magazine! The article is called “Flash Action Games, accessible fun for kids”. In the interview, we talk about the templates for accessible Flash games that we are currently working on, and some of our upcoming projects. We had sent in some loose artwork for the article, from our Whack-a-vole game, and the 2 page spread turned out great with our vole in the background!

Other articles in this issue are an interview with Holly Robinson Peete, who will star in the upcoming ABC pilot Football Wives. Her father, Matt Robinson, (Gordon on Sesame Street) suffered Parkinson’s. There is also a great interview with Chris Burke, from Life Goes On.

You can read the article here.

I have come across a few sites and blogs of how people are making their own traditional animation desks. You can buy a ready made animation workstation, such as Chromacolour’s for $2,299 or the tabletop version by animationdesks in Canada for $250. It usually is a costly ordeal, with animation discs already costing between $300 and $800. Then there is the cost of either buying or making a drawing table, sawing out a circle and mounting the disc in the table somehow. I thought I would share my set-up, which I put together for under $260.

I bought an Alvin Craftmaster table, which you can get at www.nationwidedrafting.com for $129 with free shipping. Here is a direct link. You can choose a white tabletop, instead of a wood colored one. But any drafting or art table with a white top and a pencil ledge will do. On top of the pencil ledge (you might have to pull it out as far as it can go, and tightening the screws) I put the plastic port-a-disc disk by lightfoot ltd. For the backlight, you can cut a hole in the table and clip on one of those clip-on desk lights you can get at WalMart for $5 and make it shine at the table from the back. I have never had problems seeing through at least one piece of paper in normal light though, and if I need to see through more layers of paper, I use tracing paper instead of regular white paper. Works just as well, and it saves you alot of work and $$!

We want to officially announce… our new digital corkboard system! Made in Flash, the program takes in storyboard of any size, and loads them onto the corkboard for easy sequential viewing. A next and back button takes you from one board to the other. The corkboard can take up to 9-16 storyboards per board. Together with our digital storyboard session, where we sketch out storyboards on location, afterwards, we can load the storyboards into the digital corkboard for a paperless storyboarding process! The storyboards can then be individually loaded into Flash, to start production.

Even though our production pipeline is now completely paper-less, for the people that want to start  out with traditional 2D animation, and are thinking about buying an animation disc, I want to mention the Port-a-Disc! Traditional animation discs can be expensive if bought new, and are also very heavy and bulky. You need an animation table to use it, with a built in lightbox.

But… the Port-a-Disc, for 1/4th of the price of a real animation disc, is made out of light, durable plastic, and is amazing! You can take it with you, draw with it in your lap or put it on a regular drawing table. Room lighting provides enough light through the middle, in order to give you view of 2-3 pieces of paper. Check it out at Lightfoot Ltd! The pencil holder you have to buy seperately but it sticks on with velcro.

If you are ever in San Francisco, make sure to pay a visit to the Cartoon Art Museum! I stumbled upon a sign for one of their special events in the street, and I was surprised since I had never heard of it.

They have over 6,000 original art pieces, and a whole section devoted to animation with many storyboards, original hand painted cells and backgrounds. They had wonderful cells from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Alladin, and many Hannah Barbera cells as well and even some archival prints of Gertie the Dinosaur.

They are located on 655 Mission street, one block away from the Metreon, in between Montgomery and 3rd street. It is not easy to find, but you have to look out for their yellow banner. It is a traditional gallery space, set behind their bookstore in the front. They also lead cartoon camps for kids.