My kids are in the other room watching some dreck with little ninjas on it. I’ve seen “Foster’s Home”, too. These, and others, have distinct “shockwave” look to them.
In my day, I’d call these “sprites” but I’m not sure that’s current terminology.
Pre-drawn characters that are being animated by stretching & by moving other parts “attached” to them - like computer drawn marionettes.
Why this look?
Cost and speed. Its cheaper and faster to do it this way. IIRC, the first major cartoons to do it this way were Home Movies and Dr Katz.
South Park did this pretty early on, too. The first few episodes were cardboard cutouts, but after they made enough money they went to computer graphics.
Yeah, but they’re actually using really expensive software to do South Park (Maya, Flame, and Combustion, IIRC.), whereas Shockwave and Flash are relatively inexpensive (at least by comparison).
So it is shockwave?
I understand “cheaper” - that drives the industry.
It could be. I don’t know if Foster’s uses it, nor do I remember any specific cartoons (other than the ones that I’ve already mentioned) which use it, but from what I understand, its fairly common in the industry.
I know Copernicus Studios Inc. uses some form of Flash for their work, but I can’t for the life of me find a list of what they’ve done. They have done vids for Nelly Furtado and Spesh K, that’s all I know.
According to The Boy, my resident animation expert, a lot of animated shows are being done in Flash or TuneBoom (a similar piece of software).
The company The Boy works for uses Flash primarily for their 2D work… in the 3D department, they’re using programs that are capable of producing photo-real animation - the ones I can recall of the top of my head are Shake, Maya and ZBrush.
Foster’s Home is indeed animated in Flash.
Cold Hard Flash, a blog devoted to Flash animation, gives a list of TV series that are animated in Flash (go down to “TV Series.”) A good number of these series you can definitely tell are animated in Flash when you look at them, but some of them are extremely well-done.
Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, was traditionally animated its first season, using paint and cels, but the producers switched to Flash for the final three seasons.
The price of the software (probably) isn’t that much of an issue, the enormous savings in animator time is. The difference between flash (a few hundred dollars if you’re only using flash, up to about 2.500 if you need photoshop and related software as well) and maya (about 4000 dollars) is really negligible in the scheme of things.
A single 10 minutes animation is probably already going to cost you much more (as in, an order of magnitude more) than that if you’re using traditional animation techniques.