No time like the present to get really invested in a new program that crashes all the time!

This week I dove head first into Adobe Animate. I think Adobe is positioning Animate as the natural successor to Flash, what with flash going the way of the fax machine this year. Animate is certainly easy to grasp if you've used Flash before and I found myself jumping right into simple animations with basically no learning curve. It gives you an clean interface and simple tools to make frame by frame animations, preview them and export them as traditional video files or animated gifs. It's honestly a fine program and it does what I need it to. Last time I did any extensive digital frame by frame animation, I used Photoshop's timeline feature and that was a hassle and a half, so the clean approach that Animate provides is refreshing.

For all its good, Animate is also a program that crashes incredibly - perhaps comically often. Not a single one of the projects I made this week was crash free. After a couple days, I learned which fuctions in the program most ofen prompted a crash and took to saving before using them. Weirdly, when the crashes happened as I expected, I felt a bizarre sense of satisfaction. Thankfully, it doesn't matter if I lose my progress on one of these little doodle projects. They're just nice exercises to help me learn the program and improve my animation techniques.

The animated pieces were an absolute joy to make. I will certainly work on developing more complicated animations next week and in February. Figuring out the timing for the third animation was a lot of trial and error but I am really satisfied with the anticipation and follow through as the circle blob snaps upwards to become the square. The energy of the motion feels motivated.

Fun fact about that crying animation, btw, I made it between like 12 AM and 2 AM, so I had f.lux on my computer turned waaay up. Since f.lux removes the blue light to protect your eyes, when I used the color picker to find the blue for the tears, I ended up with a green and didn't know it until I watched it back the next day. Moral of the story? I guess don't work as late as I do or don't care about what color your tears are.

This last animation is the beginning of a longer animation I hope to work on. It seems like a good idea to have one more traditional, narrative-driven piece among all these exercises.

Animating the stick figure was difficult at first, but after an hour or so, my muscle memory brought it back. aided by years upon years of flip book making back in school. (Shout out to Kevin aged 8-15, every time he was bored in class.) Adding emotion to the stick figure's movement is going to be my focus as this work continues.

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To top off a week dominated by animation, here are a couple little illustrations I did.

1. This mans right here with some wacky hair. I like him. I shall call him Daif. I'm also gonna go out on a limb here and say Daif has difficulty maintaining serious romantic relationships.

2. A medieval walled city I free formed. Been playing some Minecraft recently and I have been building a walled city with my friends. I think this was as much an exercise in planning my virtual city as it was in illustration. Plus, added bonus: I can use it in my D&D campaign if I need a walled city map.