Slimer

Man, I frigging love Ghostbusters.



So here, in all its glory, is a great example of the dangers of working in Flash.

Don't get me wrong, I like this Harry Head. It makes me smile whenever I come across it again, and that's always a good sign. BUT, if I were to animate it today, I would take a VERY different tack.

Speaking only of the content itself, if I were to do this today: it would start with SlimerHarry wolfing down food from the room service cart - then he'd notice the viewer - then he'd fly towards us - THEN the splat.

But the content isn't my main issue with this Head. The main thing is the way I cheated the animation using Flash.

Now 'cheating' shouldn't be heard as an entirely pejorative term in this context. Cheating goes on all the time in animation (both digital AND traditional). But there is good cheating (wherein, you exploit the medium and the tools to achieve something more easily that otherwise would've taken longer, if it was possible at all) and bad cheating (wherein you are just lazy, or don't know any better, and take a shortcut despite the fact that it lowers the quality of the end result).

Because the thing is: this animation is basically three very slightly altered drawings:
1. Slimer with mouth closed and arms out.
b. Slimer with mouth open and arms raised a bit.
c. Slimer, unchanged with arms a bit higher.

(plus the slime-splat at the end.)

That's it. Those drawings are motion-tweened towards the viewer, and there's an illusion that more is going on than actually is. It's basically key-frames without inbetweens. It's lazy. (and on top of that, the timing is really strange, with a sudden un-motivated acceleration at the end, rather than a more natural gradual speeding-up.)

Now at the time, I didn't know I could nest symbols inside symbols. If I had known that, then I could have at least tweened the arms up, and done something more with the mouth. That would still be very limited animation, but at least it would've been something.

Really, at the very least, Slimer should have some squash-and-stretch as he moves. The timing should favor the turns that his movement takes, and he should speed-up as he gets closer to us.

But I suppose that's the risk of looking back at work one did many years earlier: You see it through your current filter with your current level of experience and ability, and think about how you would approach it differently, today.

In the end, I DO like this one, and all the navel-gazing is just wasting time I could be spending doing something productive. Like animating a new Head.