Flash The Ripper

Update: due to work reason, author temporarily removed the video from net, but promised to put it back in a week. Please be patient.
Do you remember “Capital” music video? Meet the new work from its author. Aliaksei Tserakhau made animation for Lyapis Trubetskoy “Lights” song:

Lyapis Trubetskoy “Lights” from Aliaksei Tserakhau on Vimeo.

BTW, the “Lights” music video won the first prize in the nomination “Best Animation” of Portugal VIMUS International Music Video Festival. Its competitors were Chemical Brothers “Salmon dance” by Dom & Nic, Bjork, “Declare Independence” by Michele Gondri, and Temposhark “Blame” by Motomichi Nakamura.

Just after the nomination, Aliaksei promised to put the video online to let everybody see it, and today he did it.

Congratulations to brothers in arms!

I’ve just discovered this piece of flash art via the Adobe Edge newsletter: meet Benny the Brave:

Job perfectly done: no huge and slow stuff, everything is smart and fast, a lot of hidden pleasant surprises. Site behaves just cool, I especially like the transitions between sections.

Look at it one more time. Such sites form the heart of Flash from the beginning. A lot of respect to designers, animators, and sound designers of this site. But when I saw it, I’ve thought what could be better for flash designers to let them make more simple and outstanding art like this.

Some thoughts on Flash as the designer tool

I’m thinking a lot about possible further development of Flash. First, when I see the last version of Flash CS3 I think it is not enough to make designers really happy. Yes, it is good tool, still widely used everywhere to create cool animations. But I was expecting more. Before Flash CS3 has been released, I had a hope to show it to my friends after its release and say: “Look at Flash now! Drop your Illustrator / Photoshop if you make art for Flash — because you can make artwork in Flash IDE as you used to do in your graphic editor”. But I failed: new Flash CS3 release makes pretty small gifts to the designers. This doesn’t let me to advertise it to my friends as new designer tool. I believe I’m not the only one who had big expectations regarding this release.

Back to the title: respect to the Eugene and Louise creative studio from Antwerp – they did the webdesign and animation part. Web development was done by a Studio Plum. Benny the Brave is truly the inspiration!

In one of the next posts: why Flash CS3 hardly becomes better for the designers, point by point.

Here’s my latest work, the video for the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s song called “Charlie” to participate in the recent contest announced by the RHCP.

We’ve made this piece of shit with my friend Dmitry Simochkin. The pleasure of producing such a thing does worth those rush we’ve had during the 1 week of creating art and 1 day and night compiling it into something holistic. This project is still unfinished and there’s a lot of bugs and unsynchronicity, but we did it!