Flash Evaluation and TV Show

Adam Boland

Flash Review

Adobe Flash is a very versatile piece of software, you can do frame by frame or tween animation. My first time using Flash properly this year was really good. At first I found a bit weird to use but I think it’s really easy to pick up the basics.

 It was mainly drawing in flash that I had a bit of trouble with at first. For me I found somethings as disadvantages, drawing using vector shapes is not too great because you have to manipulate circles, oval, squares, etc, etc, to get the shape you want. This technique is time consuming at first but once you get the hang of it you get quicker at it. Most of the tools are all a bit weird to use at first, the line too in particular was a bit confusing as well. It is although really helpful, you can use it to mark off sections for cell shading and even use it as a dummy line making full movements symbols for transporting and resizing. One of the main things I really like about drawing in Flash is they are vector based which means that you can zoom in really close and the picture won’t get distorted unlike pixel based things.

 Animating in Flash isn’t too difficult, getting used to the different tweens is a bit challenging. Basic tweens and shape tweens are the main types we used. They work fairly well but sometimes they distort and if they do that you have to use a shape hint to correct this. Shape hints work really well. So all in all I found Adobe Flash tricky to use at first but once I got used to it, it became a lot easier to use.       

TV Show

The television show that uses Flash I chose is Nelly and Nora by Geromino Productions. Nelly and Nora is a pre-school animation that is shown on RTÉ junior and CBeebies, it’s about two sisters and their family getting up to all sorts of activities. The show is mainly about the weather and what the girls get up to in the different types of weather. I think the way they use flash is very interesting, some of it looks like it’s been drawn using shapes but they have been drawn by hand on flash. The animation as well is so smooth. The characters are designed in Flash too, it makes it much easier to animate and rig rather than making each part in a different program. The backgrounds though are made in Photoshop and when it’s brought into Flash whatever needs to be animated is done there. As I said the animation is smooth, but it is also because the movements are very simple. Flash is perfect for that, sometimes Flash can mess up or glitch out if some movements are too complicated. Nelly and Nora is a fairly flat cartoon, whether that is a style choice or not but it could be cause by Flash as it is harder to get a proper feel of depth due to the puppet like rigging system. Flaws aside Nelly and Nora is a very good and well-made show and a lot of the reasons for that is because of Adobe Flash.        

The Walks

This is my Cowboy Walk



This is my Pimp Walk




This is my Heisenberg Walk

Character Design Reference

  These are Pimp examples for my Pimp walk




  I chose Hesienberg from Breaking Bad for my front                                                                                walk. Here are some reference images.

Cowboy and Pimp Walk

This is the gif I used for recreating the cowboy walk and my pimp walk

Walk Cycle References

This is the gif I used for my Front Walk Cycle!!

Here are some front walk cycle references Here are some side walk references