Studio/Artist Exploration - Craig McCraken

     One of the animators that originally sparked my interest in learning Adobe Flash was Craig McCraken. As part of a school project at the California Institute of the Arts, he created a short film in 1992 called Whoopass Stew! A Sticky Situation.

     This short film eventually became the basis of the TV Show “The Powerpuff Girls” and landed him a job at Hanna-Barbarbara studios working as the art director for 2 Stupid Dogs and Dexter's Laboratory. He began producing Powerpuff girls in 1995 which appeaed as a short film, and eventually became a series of full half hour episodes in 1998 lasting for 6 seasons and was the highest rated premier in Cartoon Network's history. It went on to win both Emmy and Annie awards in 2002. However, the animator was frustrated by the then standard process of producing storyboard and timing here in the US but shipping the content overseas to the Seoul based studio Rough Draft for the actual animation process. McCraken said is was frustrating not being there to actually supervise and the animation and felt it never had the same finesse as if the animation was done here.

     In 2004 he began work on the TV series animated entirely in Adobe Flash called “Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends” with Cartoon Network, winning both Emmy and Annie awards. With this series he set out to re-create the production pipeline. Before the 1980's all animation was produced and animated in the same building, until the studios found it more profitable to ship the animation work overseas. However after the arrival of inexpensive 2D digital animation software (specifically Adobe Flash), McCraken set out to re-establish the practice of production and animation again taking place in the same location. He and Eric Pringle set up a system where half the episodes were created here in the US and the other half were created by Boulder Media in Ireland.
After his experience creating Foster's Home in flash, he re-visited the Powerpuff Girls creating a feature length film in flash. He said producing the animation in flash really “cuts the animation phase of production practically in half. But the best thing on a Flash series is the animators are right down the hall – it makes doing retakes super easy. We make the whole cartoon in one building like the old days at Termite Terrace, though today it would be more like Terabyte Terrace.” In his interview at ColdHardFlash.com about the 10^th aniversary of Powerpuff Girls, McCraken described the process of creating the girls into a very complex series of masked, nested symbols allowing them to move eyes, eybrows, pupils, cheeks, and hair over 20 different facial poses. Since the 3 girls models are practically identical, once the rigging was complete, all they had to do was change the colors and the hair for the other models.
     After seeing a roundtable discussion about current tv animation production at Siggraph in 2008 by one of the animators who worked on Fosters Home and has since gone on to work on many other current tv series and advertisement shorts all in flash, I started reading up a little about this process used and checked out some of these shows created in flash to see the quality they are able to create.