Alan Becker's, who also goes by the name albinoblacksheep, quirky animation called Animator vs Animation shows the different elements of Flash Professional 8 while be engaging and comedic. The flash movie blurs the boundaries between the user and and Becker's animation. It brings physicality to the characters he makes.
The movie starts off with a movie clip Becker makes labeled victim. The victim eventually breaks out of the symbol's bounding box and fights the creator's mouse with keyframes, line strokes and assortment of flash tools. The unique aspect about this movie is that the character and the user both interact with Flash's interface in different ways. At one point Becker tries to delete the animated character in the menu but the character crawls up and scratches the word delete out with the pen tool. By the end of the movie, majority of the interface is either altered or completely destroyed.
It helps to have a previous knowledge of Flash to enjoy the movie. Some of the tools' functions would be confusing otherwise. In one such example the symbol named victim creates copies of itself to attack the user's arrow. If someone did not know what actions symbols performed or even what a symbol is, the joke would lose its value.
Since the movies is about the flash interface created in flash, it is important to see how the artist might have made this movie. It first appears that he only used a screenshot as the background. This is not the case however since in one scene the keyframes from the movie slide on to the work area in every which way. The interface interacts with the characters so much it's hard to seperate the flash animation from the possible screenshot. The result is a very complex workload.
The movie can be found at http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/animator.
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