Is the concept of authoring with Flash actually dead/deprecated? I've been trying to understand--and maybe you're willing to help answer this--whether Adobe Animate is just a newer version of Adobe Flash that can target things other than the deprecated Flash web player/plugin.
That's pretty much it - though it's been able to target other platforms since long before the "Animate" name change. I believe it still has a small-but-significant market share in the animation industry (mostly TV stuff) (hence the name!), but there's waning support for anything else.
That said, Ruffle ( https://ruffle.rs/ ) is keeping flash alive on the web, preserving the legacy of flash and enabling people to make new things like this! Newgrounds hosts a contest every year since the "death of flash" to see who can make the best new thing, (that's what this was made for, actually): https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1523958
Last I heard, my buddy Pringle was still using it to do Teen Titans. He picked it up along with me when we were at Spumco doing web stuff and ended up at Cartoon Network, doing stuff like Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.
I think the last I heard from him was like a decade ago, so who knows, maybe he and his crew finally moved on to some other tool. But it definitely persisted in the animation industry long after the browser plugin got killed off. Adobe's still cranking out new versions every year, too, so it's not like you're stuck using ancient operating systems to run it.
Since you worked at Spumco, weren't the animators using a combo of hand-drawn work and PowerAnimator or did things move on quite quickly to digital art by the time you were there?
While Adobe is still making animate Teen Titans Go! (a Spongebob-esque spinoff of the original show), as well as many other US animated shows past 2012, moved on to Toon Boom.
I was there during the WPH era, when there was a hybrid digital/physical process. The workflow was boards>layout>inks>painstaking hand-optimization of scanned inks in some autotrace program that's long gone>Flash>color>animation. The parts that John interfered with the most were layout and animation. The Flash side wasn't allowed to draw a damn thing, we just chopped up approved drawings and moved them around.
So I just watched WPH as I haven't seen that one before and noticed the cat was similar to the one in the Weird Al Yaknovic music video for No Cigar. I don't know if personally you had a hand in that one, but all in all, the show looks pretty good for 1999 and probably looked less stiff on a CRT than it does on my phone.
I didn't touch that video but that yeah that sure is Cigarettes in it.
The WPH crew was pushing really hard on what could be done in the medium of a Flash cartoon delivered via a dialup modem, but it sure is hard to look at most of that animation now.
Wow no kidding! The Spumco web stuff was before my time, but Foster's started airing right around the time I picked up flash, when I was like nine (it was a favorite show of mine!) There were a lot more flash shows on TV back then, and most look pretty crappy by today's standards, but at least that one holds up pretty well.
Adobe Animate is not the same as Flash. Flash could do things that the HTML/CSS spec simply did not support before 2010, like <video>. Even now, Adobe Animate cannot do a 3D shooter because it is limited by what the browser supports.
