How Japanese Animators Use Flash to Create Amazing TV Animation

Science Saru, the new studio started by Japanese directors Masaaki Yuasa and Eunyoung Choi, has shared a behind-the-scenes look at how they used Flash in the recent TV series Ping Pong. Says the studio:

In this short video you can see the “insides” of two scenes we worked on for the show. Animators developed a new digital technique, in order to get slow movements, turnings and big zooms, that would have been very difficult in hand-drawn animation.

Yuasa and Choi haven’t reinvented the wheel. They have the same tools available to everyone else who has Flash—shape tweens, motion tweens, symbols—but they use those techniques to achieve results that don’t look anything like the cheap-looking product we tend to associate with the software.

Black Dynamite director LeSean Thomas puts it best when he says, “Remember: There’s a difference between good programmers who move things in Flash and good, traditional animators who use Flash.”