Platform Day 5

Renegade North attends the Flasher's Convention

Clockwise from left: Kevin Martonick, Alec Knox, Eric Killkenney, Jeremy Joseph, Ben Burch.
Sill awaiting at time of picture: Lucas Haley and our fearless leader David Weiner.
Behind the camera: Sam Niemann

The whole Renegade North crew decided to take a couple hours out from our Mr Men work to attend the "Flash: Love It or Hate It" panel discussion. The panel was moderated by Aaron Simpson of Cold Hard Flash and on the panel were Nina Paley, an independent animator working by herself on a Flash animated feature called "Sita Sings the Blues" (You should google it. It's totally gorgeous!) David SanAngelo of Soup2Nuts, Brendan Burch of Six Point Harness and two other panelists that I thought I'd be able to look up, but they're not listed, so I'll have to track down their names and positions for you.

Frankly, I'm not sure we got a lot out of the discussion. In fact, I think we should have actually been on the panel. That's not a criticism of the panelists. They were qualified, experienced professionals and entertaining to listen to. But we Flash professionals already know much of what they discussed.

• Flash is just a tool and an animator needs fundamental animation skills first.
• Macromedia has been behaving like head up their ass jerks for years and we all hope Adobe does better.
  
• Flash has limits and needs help from other tools like After Effects to be effective for film or broadcast.

I'm looking at my notes and trying to think of what I heard today at the panel that would be newsworthy for you, but I can't come up with anything. I'll talk to the gang about it tomorrow and see if I'm missing something. This post may have a post script.

Independent Flash Animator Nina Paley. On the left is David SanAngelo of Soup2Nuts

Brendan Burch of Six Point Harness and Aaron Simpson of Cold Hard Flash