In a Flash

Look What You Can Do with Macromedia’s Latest Release

Lots of layering, alpha channel support, bitmap caching and blend modes are just a few of the reasons why people are buzzing about the newest version of Flash from Macromedia. But even before Flash Professional 8 was introduced, studios started to put out some slick and innovative projects that not only include Web site creation but also 2D animated television spots.

Though Flash, as a platform, may be the new kid in a neighborhood populated by Windows, Real Media and QuickTime, the revolution is already here. More and more pros are migrating to Flash, as both a media player and a development tool. So read on, and start thinking of all the things you could do with it.

Studio: Big Spaceship

Brooklyn, NY
Creative: Micael Lebowitz, CEO/co-founder
Project: entertheunderworld.com, promo Web site for the upcoming Underworld: Evolution

By using the advanced features in Flash Professional 8 and its support for alpha channels in playback, Big Spaceship studio was able to go for the jugular with its promo site, www.entertheunderworld.com, for the upcoming film Underworld: Evolution, the sequel to the 2003 film Underworld from Sony Pictures Entertainment. The film is about vampires, and the site appropriately projects a dark, cool and eerie effect with a smooth, gothic feel.

According to Michael Lebowitz, co-founder and CEO of Big Spaceship, the plan was to "bring the new movie poster to life." He explains that "by combining some of the new features of Flash with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects for image retouching/manipulation, text layout and video editing/effects respectively, we were able to blend some of the footage from the first movie with the poster for the new movie. About 95 percent of the work we do here is done in Flash [the company was literally founded on Flash more than six years ago]. We’ve been working with it for a long time, but what stands out about this project for us is that it’s the very first project we were able to do in Flash 8, and we got to take advantage of a lot of the things it had to offer. We actually developed this project using the Beta software of Flash 8 even before the commercial release was available."

Lebowitz points to several new features that he says really helped give this project a boost, starting with alpha channel support. "This is an incredible advancement for what is now possible on the Web. It’s a huge leap forward. Now that you have the full alpha channel transparency, you can start doing video layering techniques that would never have been possible before. Plus, you can combine that with interactivity. You can now layer however you want in traditional broadcast design packages. In this case, we worked with several layers — the clip we used from the original film, the background poster, the snow falling (which is part of the poster look we were trying to capture) and text animation — all flowing together and all layered over each other seamlessly."

In order to create the snow itself, Big Spaceship relied on Flash 8’s bitmap caching feature. "That let us take vector graphics, which are very, very small and place bitmapped-like effects on them. So, what we have here is a program that generates random snow, a little script, and we have one little tiny vector element that’s repeated over and over with different levels of bitmapped effects so it feels much more like natural snow but with very small file size." He explains that his team also used the same bitmap caching techniques for the text and the iconic image of Selene (the movie’s main character, played by actress Kate Beckinsale) to create "video reflections in her eyes and in her crossed pistols." Lebowitz says there’s a lot more where this came from. "This is just one part of a very large campaign. We can’t really talk about anything else yet, but we definitely have more coming."

Studio: FlickerLab

New York, NY
Creative: Harold Moss, creative director; Zartosht Soltani, artist/designer
Project: Celebrity Poker Showdown

When Bravo first decided to bring Celebrity Poker Showdown to its audience two years ago, it called on New York animation studio FlickerLab to create the program’s animated 2D opening sequence for producers Picture This Television.

By combining the features of Flash MX, Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, FlickerLab was able to create a design that’s nostalgic of old, "Rat Pack" Las Vegas. "We really used Flash to generate the character animation," says Harold Moss, creative director of FlickerLab. "Everything was composited in After Effects and a lot of the textures and elements were created in Photoshop because we were going for a very textured, hand-made look. But we used Flash to build all of the character animation. One of the great things about Flash, even though it wasn’t designed as an animation tool for broadcast, is it’s still such a simple and quick way to animate and see the results of your animation. At every stage, we created the roughs inside Flash and brought them in and composited them in After Effects." Then, he says, they added other elements. "As we went along, we cleaned them up and continued to update them. But you’re always able to see what your animation is going to look like as you’re working without any kind of export or rendering. And there’s no limit to the look of the animation, because if you look at this project, the point wasn’t to create a cartoon-like, fluid sort of animation but rather, a retro kind of’50s/’60s open to try and get a feel of old Las Vegas. The look of it isn’t something that most people think of as Flash. It’s not clean-lined and it’s not graphic. Instead, it appears handmade and textured [a signature FlickerLab look]. Flash allowed us to intensify the animation without drawing, scanning, ink or painting, while retaining the appearance of those qualities in the art. And for that, it’s because we were able to combine it with the textures we created elsewhere."

While the project was created in Flash MX, Moss says FlickerLab is now using Flash 8, included in Macromedia’s Studio 8 package, with new features such as advanced filters, blend modes and an improved text tool. "Probably the biggest feature in Flash 8 that’s exciting to me at this point is motion curves," he says. "You can actually edit motion curves the same way you could in a compositing or 3D program. You now have much more control in terms of key-frame animation."

Showtime Networks, Inc.

Creative: Chris Lucas, VP/executive producer, digital media
Project: SHO.com Screening Room

As VP and Executive Producer for Showtime Networks, Inc., Chris Lucas oversees production of all of Showtime’s online, ITV, wireless and other digital media initiatives. This means that all things creative, as well as technical- and production-related, go through him. As a hands-on user of Flash MX Professional 2004 and Flash Professional 8, he has first-hand knowledge of one of Showtime’s most recent projects, the SHO.com Screening Room (sho.com/video). Here, visitors have instant access to programming clips through an intuitive user interface. Since the site launched in late May, it has increased clip viewership by more than 150 percent.

"As a premium television network, streaming video — making video available to our Web site visitors — is strategically very important," explains Lucas. "What we’ve done with this project is aggregated roughly between three and four thousand different video assets into one single application. Before, they had been sort of islands unto themselves — we had all of our L Word clips aggregated, Queer as Folk clips aggregated, etc. We incorporated them all together and now they are all found in one single application. And we also incorporated a number of features into that including a very intuitive and user-friendly way of exploring and navigating to other content. What is certainly very important to us is the ability to cross-promote the programming. If someone is accessing Weeds content, for instance, our application has the ability to cross promote other programming that we feel is relevant and appropriate to that particular audience. So, it’s not just cross promoting but doing it in a way that is very contextually appropriate. Flash was the best platform for this because it makes some capabilities available to us we don’t have available using other technologies or just using an HTML player.

The player, says Lucas, is critical to the whole user experience. "To begin with, we have complete control of the player, from design to player controls— the ability to play and rewind, fast forward, go to full screen. Second, we have a drag-and-drop style of navigation that is not possible using other formats."

Lucas and his team are evaluating Flash Professional 8 and looking at some of what it offers. Aside from alpha channel support, Lucas says his group is interested in the new version’s functionality improvements. "The program also gets into some of the animation controls, some of the blending and some of the font rendering capabilities we feel are superior to the previous version."

He adds, "Right now, a lot of people think of major deployed formats like Windows, Real and QuickTime for viewing video. And Flash, comparatively speaking, is somewhat new on the scene. Yet it has the largest installed user base."