Working with Large File Sizes

Because Flash output is usually intended for the Web, Flash file size is often a dominant concern. But when creating cartoons for broadcast output, this concern is thrown to the wind. In cartoon land, you create for digital video output via QuickTime or Windows AVI and these file sizes can be huge. It's common for such projects to expand into the gigabytes, so it's important to have the equipment to handle this kind of work. This means the more RAM and hard drive space you have, the happier you will be. If you try to build a full-length animation masterpiece in one Flash file, you'll be setting yourself up for a rocky and inefficient production process. As you continue to add artwork and animation to your Flash file, it takes longer to render an .swf for preview and it takes even longer to render a sequence for raster output. You can use several strategies to make your animation more manageable. As we describe in this section, start with a good storyboard and follow through with a series of separate Flash files organized into scenes.

You'll spend many hours working on your animation, so back it up as often as you can! The project file is precious. Make a habit of keeping incremental backups on various hard drive volumes or archived CDs or DVDs so that you won't lose everything when disaster strikes (it will). A good plan is to make a new copy on a different hard drive volume or disk after each major change, rotating through two or three different storage locations. This way, if Flash eats your project file or a disk or drive fails, you can always go back to the version you saved an hour ago (which should be on a different disk) without losing much time. The same versioning logic used in other documents can be applied to your Flash animation files: start with myFile_100, go to myFile_101, myFile_102, and so on as you make small adjustments and revisions. When you get to a significant change or a semifinished version of your file, save it as myFile_200, and so on. This makes it easy to find your way back to a specific phase of the project at any time.

Storyboarding Scenes and Shots

Let's assume that you already have characters and a story and you want to build a cartoon based on that inspired beginning. Although it's okay to experiment and develop characters, never start a serious cartoon project without a storyboard. The storyboard is your roadmap, your plan, your menu of things needed, and your best friend when your project gets complicated. The storyboard can be loose and roughly sketched out, but it should help you start to see the flow of your story and to make decisions about how best to communicate it visually.

On the CD-ROM 

You'll find a storyboard template on the CD-ROM, in the ch14 folder. It's an .eps (storyboardMAC.eps or storybPC.eps) template form that includes all the essentials of a basic storyboard. Print it out as is, or import it into FreeHand, Illustrator, or Flash, and modify it to suit your needs.

As you sketch the overall story, you can break up the narrative into workable cartoon scenes. Long before Flash, cartoonists used the term "scene" to describe something quite different than a Flash Scene. By cartoon scenes, we mean phases in a narrative, similar to movie or TV scenes. Remember that cartoons are fast-paced adventures — most cartoon scenes last less than 30 seconds. Generally, a cartoon scene can stand alone, but it needs other scenes to complete the story. Fast-paced as it is, 30 seconds of animation still requires between 360 and 720 frames in the Flash Timeline. It becomes unruly if you rely solely upon Flash's Scene feature — you'd do a lot of scrubbing, just trying to cover one scene.

After your cartoon scenes are in order, you can start to establish the camera angles or "shots" for key moments. A shot is a break or change in the camera framing or viewpoint. For example, in a soap opera dialogue scene, the camera will cut back and forth between characters to show each person talking — one scene will include many shots. Although the art of cinematography is beyond the scope of this book, the same tricks used to add drama to live action are involved when deciding shots in a cartoon scene. Always try to introduce variety in the viewpoint; think of ways to add interest with close-ups or extreme angles. If you're looking at a series of shots with characters all in the same basic position within the frame, keeping the same distance from the viewer, you're looking at a scene that will turn out to be pretty dull. If you can cut some visual contrast into the scene while still pushing your narrative forward, you'll have a better chance of keeping your viewers hooked in long enough to connect with your characters and to appreciate your story.

Flash Scenes and Project Files

Never create an entire cartoon in one Flash project file (.fla)! Even trying to load the huge files can cause problems for Flash. Instead, create a separate Flash project file for each storyboard scene and use Flash's Scene function to organize shots within a cartoon scene. (This may seem confusing at first, but the utility of this method will become clear as you work on your masterpiece.) In other words: The Flash project file (.fla) is a storyboard scene, and the shots, or Flash Scenes, are nested within the project file.

Voices, Sound Effects, and Ambient Sound

The single most important work you'll do in your cartoon is not the drawing, but the voices of your characters; the voices give the characters heart and depth. In fact, some animators prefer to record the voices first and then use the performance of the voice actors as inspiration for the animated characters' movements and expressions. Obtaining a voice can be as simple as speaking into a microphone in front of your computer or as complex as having a highly paid professional speaking into a microphone in a studio. The key here is not the type of voice, but the emotion put into it. If you capture a unique voice with the right emotion, it can be taken into an editing program, such as Sound Forge or Acid, and tweaked with effects to render the exact cartoon sound that you're looking for. Audio effects, including adjustments to pitch and timing, can always be added digitally; human emotion cannot. Some online voice resources are

• www.voicecasting.com

• www.voicetraxwest.com

• www.world-voices.com

Another important part of cartoons is the use of sound effects. Many good sound-effects collections are available on CD-ROM and online. You can even find sound effects CDs in bargain bins at your local music store. A couple of the collections that we keep on hand are The Ultimate Digital Sound Effects Library from the Sound Effects Company, and Crashes, Collisions & Catastrophes from Madacy Records. We also recommend any of the Loops for Acid CDs from Sonic Foundry. The sounds included in these collections can be imported into any sound- editing program to be mixed into your own original soundscapes. If you've never worked with someone who specializes in custom sound creation, you might be amazed at the magic they can add to even simple animation.

Web Resource 

One online source that offers a variety of effects at a broad range of prices, and RealAudio links that allow you to audition them online, is www.radiomall.com. Another popular site that has a subscription-based system for thousands of royalty-free sounds is www.platinumloops.com.

Sometimes, you just can't find the sound you need. Fortunately, it's not difficult to set up your own little Foley stage or sound effects recording area. A good shotgun microphone (highly directional for aiming at sound) and DAT recorder are ideal, although you can get by with less. The capture device (audio tape, DAT, miniDV, MD, and so on) should be portable, not only in order to get it away from the whirring sound of hard drives and fans, but also to enable you to take it on location when needed. Another advantage of a battery-powered portable device is that static from power line voltage won't be a problem. After you get started and begin playing around, you'll be surprised at the sounds that you can create with ordinary objects. Squeeze your dish soap bottle, and you might notice that when amplified, it will make a nice whoosh. Great for the fast limb movement of that character doing a karate chop. Crumpled paper can sound like fire — once you get started, you never know what you might put to use around the house. Be creative — innovate!

The voices and the sound effects in a cartoon grab your attention and punctuate action, but listen more closely when you watch an engaging animated piece (or any film), and you will gain appreciation for the subtle art of ambient sounds. These background noises add tone and atmosphere, making a scene rich and believable. Ambient sound should almost be "felt" more than heard so it doesn't distract from your main narrative. Because it is layered behind the more dominant sounds, you can often get away with looping a short sample of ambient sound — think of wind or water sounds or distant city noises, they have some variation but they also tend to have a repetitive rhythm. And of course, don't overdo it. Well-timed silence can be a powerful narrative device, too!

Web Resource 

There are also many great resources available online for further study of sound and sound effects — one tutorial that we found useful was through the webmonkey site at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/33/index0a.html.