Anime Dreams

Flash animations, Photoshop tricks, cartooning, and graphics fun

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Animation is the second cousin to magic. Your animation doesn't actually have to be perfect, it only has to look close enough to the real thing so that people "get the idea".

Here's a good example. The goal was to create a Japanese style New Year's card, complete with Japanese kanji for the text, and they had to be painted by a brush....

Keeping in mind that it only had to 'appear' that they were being painted, the quick and dirty approach that we came up with was to create the kanji characters, then mask them with a series of sliding borderless rectangles. They were then unmasked as our animated, moving brush moved over their locations.

The result was a surprisingly small (14kb), and client pleasing flash animation created using SwishMax. The Japanese kanji characters were typed as text, then broken into shapes. All the animation was done using Swish moves. The Mt. Fuji brush strokes are actually shapes modified to look like brush strokes.

I highly recommend using SwishMax for simple animations like this. It's fast and easy to use. This particular animation tool less than an hour to create including several false starts.

Posted by Lem on December 29, 2004 | Permalink

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