I am so tired of looking at this guy.
Over the last few days, Adobe Flash has been throwing little tantrums at me. I think the animation for Fear the Future is just asking a little too much in terms of length, nested animations, and other things. I’ve been moving my Flash animations over to video file formats. I do this to get rid of the problems and ensure timing consistency between the three screens, each of which plays a separate animation that must be synched to the others.
Rendering to video is just a trial-and-error thing, working around the bugs and half-assed implementations of various codecs. I export a SWF to Quicktime in Flash and it leaves ghost pixels. I try the same thing from After Effects and it drops nested animation frames. Use a different video codec, and it hangs. The whole thing sucks.
One piece of software that did its job was SmartMouth. This takes speech audio and generates frames for animated lip movement. It’s not perfect–you still have to go in and manually fix frames. But it saves a huge amount of time from manually setting all the lip frames.