Abstract

Life beyond Flash - the heart breaking story of an animator and his software

Don't we all love those silly web cartoons! A generation of consumers grew up on films, games, websites powered by flash driven media. Almost by accident, Flash fueled a grass roots movement of kitchen sink animators and boutique animation studios that came from the web and eventually conquered TV and even Cinema.

Sadly, Adobe Flash itself did not grow with the animators that helped make it so successful. On the contrairy. With every iteration, the application grows slower, gets more buggy, crashes more often and the occasional half-assed new feature is implemented so poorly that it really makes us shake our heads.

Animators and designers that want to do more sophisticated work still have to turn to other solutions. In his talk, Alexander will show different projects accomplished with different software solutions and talk about some ins and outs and key features of packages like Adobe Flash, Toonboom, TV Paint, After Effects and Cinema 4D, also going through subjects of pricing, time cost and learning curves, workflow and scalability, happy accidents and personal defeat.

What is fun, what works well for what kind of project and team size. After all, animators should not have to go through tutorials and different software demos all day, animators shall animate.

Personal blog alexandergellner.de
Studio www.bitteschoen.tv

Bio and Company

Alexander Gellner

Alexander studied Communication Design at the University of Applied Science in Berlin.
In 2005 he started his business as a directing animator and illustrator. Alexander works for many clients and tries to create as many comics films and fun things as possible.

His musicvideos for popband Ich+Ich are still quite known while his more recent directing work for high school band buddies SDP made them youtube-famous but sadly not rich.
His short film „Akte Yps“ (codirected with comic artist Flix) won first place at Bitfilm and is running at this year's ITFS.

In 2011 he founded bitteschön.tv with Roland Brückner. Together, they produce narrative driven illustration and animation.