05/01/07

The death of flash animation?

This follows from a thowaway line in the idea-packed conversation (part one; part two) between Russell Davies and Richard Huntingdon, two big brained thinkers on the future of communications.

Richard says something like, “who cares about web design when broadband [i.e. IPTV and all that sort of stuff] makes it all about the content: if I was a flash designer I’d be very scared right now. Who needs animation when you can get proper film…”

I was chatting to a mate last night who has recently set up a production company, which has included some animation work. We were remarking how hard it is to do animation well, and how disproportionately expensive it is - compared to what clients expect to pay for it. He’d just done a ‘low budget’ animation which ended up costing the client £18k for 3-4 minutes, which we both agreed was very good value for the client, but it had nearly killed him.

The point that came up was that, as Flash (the platform) gets so very much better at distributing video content (YouTube and GoogleVideo, along with all the other web 2.0 video sharing sites use flash to encode and display video) does that not have an adverse effect on Flash as an animation channel?

In the days when file size and bandwidth were a real issue, flash was great because vectors (i.e. animation shapes) took up a tiny amount of space as they were just values in a program. Designers were encouraged to use flash in able to learn how to get around thye horrors of delivering rich (i.e. moving image and sound) content when there was no standard for delivering video, and when video tended to require hugely fast internet connections. Flash movies also scaled which meant you could make something tiny that would also scale up to a massive size.

Flash’s ability to do this meant that animation became the de facto method of deploying ‘rich’ content online. One by-product of this was the infuriating ’skip intro’ style flash work that became so derised and hated and emblematic of everything that was wrong with indulgent web design. But it also meant that animation - particularly vector based animation but also the other types of animation that flash allowed - began to become more and more popular as a craft, and that people became very skilled at it. You need only look at the work of production companies like Nexus or Airside to see how prevalent this aesthetic has become. I’m not saying it’s all to do with flash, but it must be an influence. It was - and remains - a fantastic entry-level animation product for web-based content.

The problem for Macromedia though, is that as it becomes easier to use the Flash Video Player [FLV] (which doesn’t necessarily need you to own Macromedia’s Flash product), they may be making Flash as an authoring tool more and more niche. The video player has become the very best, most widely-adopted, and safest (i.e. most likely to work) method of playing video online that bypasses the whole QuickTime, WMV, Real and other plugin and platform headaches. It is possible to argue that the development of FLV has made Flash as an authoring tool redundant to non-animators.

So what we can see is that a medium (Flash animation authored in the flash program) which became more and more pervasive online through sheer adoption, ease of use, and aptitude to the job it had to do (i.e. deliver moving image over a web connection) is becoming redundant because of the success of its own prowess and evolution towards delivering another format (video) which is, as Richard said, much better, richer, and desirable than it is.

Animation then, certainly online, may be in danger of snatching defeat from the jaws of success. After ten years of growth in animation, and the mushrooming of skills, communities, and education around delivering web-based animation - perhaps the technological leap of delivering video much better will actually put animation back in the ‘niche’ box?

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Design, Web.

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