Chris Georgenes Rocks

Last night we had the pleasure of having Chris Georgenes speak at the Boston Flash Platform User Group. I knew Chris was an awesome animator, so expected to hear a great talk, but he actually changed the way I think about Flash. Well, maybe “expanded” my view of Flash as a professional tool.

As an ActionScript developer who hangs around with way too many other ActionScript developers, I have probably developed a somewhat slanted view of what Flash is all about. That includes a sort of elitist view of developers as professionals and the true owners of the Flash platform, and designers who we occasionally tolerate touching Flash as long as they don’t dare write any code, but would rather they stayed in their design tools such as PhotoShop and Fireworks, and hand us off static graphics to incorporate into the app that WE (the developers) are building. 🙂

Chris largely changed that view. Here is a guy who, by his own admission, couldn’t code his way out of a wet paper bag. Who, if he needs anything coded, calls up a coder friend to do it for him. And yet, this guy is as much, and probably more, of a professional Flash user than any coder I know. And the ways he is using Flash make it look like a program I have never even opened. A couple times I turned around to Doug and Michelle and the three of us looked at each other with mouths open, saying, “I didn’t know Flash did that!”

I admit, that when Chris opened his first FLA, and I saw the all those layers and ALL those keyframes, I cringed a little bit. To me, a coder, that is chaos. But as he went on to explain things, I realized it was highly organized. Incredibly organized. In the same way we use classes and methods and properties, he uses nested symbols and keyframes. Every symbol has an exact place in the heirarchy – body, arm, upper arm, lower arm, hand. Keyframes contain individual mouth shapes, hand shapes, eye shapes, etc. He showed a section of lip-syncing that was spot on and contained dozens of precise mouth shapes that matched up exactly to what the character was saying. Someone asked how long that would take him to do. I thought he was going to say an hour, or maybe 30 minutes. Nope. Five minutes tops, because he knows exactly where each mouth image is, what sound it corresponds to, and how to switch the mouth to the exact sound very quickly. I was very impressed.

If you want to know more about how he does this stuff, check out his book, How to Cheat in Flash CS3. In the meantime, check out his work site, Mudbubble, and personal blog, Keyframer.