Jason Fruchter, Flash Animator and Illustrator

Jason will be speaking on October 19th at 2pm-4pm in D126p, the Library Screening Room on the Bellevue College campus.

Jason began using Flash in 1996. He creates Flash animation for games, education and entertainment platforms. Jason has ten years experience as an approved children’s book illustrator for several Nickelodeon and other production studio properties including Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, Ni hao, Kai-lan, Dinosaur Train, and Team Umizoomi


The theme of this presentation will be Creating Character Animation in Flash.

Several examples of character animation will be shown. They represent projects geared toward entertainment, education, and gaming.

A variety of Flash related techniques will be demonstrated including: using symbols to create Flash style “puppet” animation, creating keyframes to plan out the action sequence, making the character talk using “lip sync”, and how to create emotions using facial expressions. In addition, traditional “hand drawn” animation techniques will be demonstrated which do not use automatically generated “tweens” in Flash, just the mind of an animator!

Included throughout the presentation will be discussions on the “principals of animation” as used by traditional animators. These principals include: timing, anticipation, recoil, squash and stretch, and overlapping action.

Overall, this presentation will demonstrate how to best animate a character in Flash by combining Flash’s automatically generated “tweening” with traditional animation techniques. The result is an entertaining and compelling character viewers of your animation will be sure to enjoy!