Freehand to flash.

[modslife]

Hello;
I am working on making a film using flash. I have a few question for anyone who can answer them. All help would be greatly appreciated.
All characters and story boards will be sketched and transferred into freehand, where I plan to develop them further before transferring them to the Flash library. Is this a wasted step?

I was replied with this in the general help forum:
The only problem with Freehand is that it can produce complex vectors which Flash cannot deal with. You should probably do most of the outline drawing in Freehand as that's what you're comfortable in and then use Flash to do the detail work so you don't end up with stuff too complex for Flash. Though to be honest, i'm don't really deal with illustration that much so I could be completely wrong. You're best off asking in the Design and Graphics forum.

If this is true, will I be able to get as good a detail using Flash to replace detail.
What are the causes and effects for doing everything in freehand first?
Eventually I’m aiming at entering this movie into the local film fest, It’ll be 6 short movies, forming a full movie. So it’s aim is to be able to transfer onto film. 60-80min long. Roughly looking at 10-15 minutes per short.
Thanks for all your help.

[seapod00]

I would just draw everything in Flash straight out. That way, ther is no conversion issue at all. I'm assuming you're using a Wacom tablet?

[modslife]

Yeah I have a wacom tablet, but it's a smaller one. I havn't yet tried it in flash tho!

[seapod00]

the smaller ones seem better than the big ones to me because you have the whole screen in that smaller area. you don't have to make wide swoops to draw something.

i think that you'd save yourself a lot of time doing it right in Flash.

are you doing line drawings or drawings with lots of shading, etc.?

[modslife]

I'm just worried about detail, I do use a lot of shading. My goal is to use the tricks from the old Spiderman and Anime cartoons.
No real movement just background and focus movement. So I figure I can sacrifice from the actual "animation" of it to spruce up the detail. I guess it may just boil down to finding a balance to sacrifice to. So this leads to another question,
Does anyone have an example of how far detail goes just using Flash?

[seapod00]

Can you have the backgrounds be detailed jpgs a la Photoshop/Illustrator/Freehand + import them as jpgs and then use the line animation capabilities of Flash for characters, etc.?

That's what I'd suggest, but maybe a more guru type Flasher will answer you with some other amazing method.

[modslife]

No your right, that's it exactly, The Backgrounds would be more efficiently done in Photoshop/Freehand and imported as JPegs. I think maybe it's time to start putting some actual animation together and see how it works. Thanks for the brainstorming!