Ryjak's Animation Blog

For my first critique, I will be analyzing Prowlies at the River, the animation which is currently in the number one slot on Newgrounds.com. Prowlies is an animation by Adam Phillips, a senior special effects animator at Walt Disney Animation Australia, and has participated on such projects as An Extremely Goofy Movie, The Lion King 2, and has just finished up on The Three Musketeers. The animation Prowlies is the second installment of Adams’ Brackenwood series, about a pan-like creature named Brackenwood who lives in a forest not of this world. In Prowlies, Brackenwood is awoken from blissful slumber to by an animal which appears to be a wood pecking lizard. Brackenwood attempts to apprehend the creature which eludes him, and settles on going down to his water store, which the lizard promptly befouls. After dealing with the lizard, Brackenwood rushes into the treetops, and we are all treated to some amazing animated scenes of Brackenwood swinging from tree to tree, changing camera angles in mid stride. A birdlike creature is dealt with along the way, and Brackenwood finally arrives at the river, where we are introduced to the Prowlies. The prowlies are small inquisitive creatures who live in a communal group, and when Brackenwood startles them by bursting out of the woods and roaring, they attack him en masse. Brackenwood soundly defeats them with a stunning display of speed and agility, appearing to humiliate a member of their group by tossing him into the river. He proceeds to take a drink, when he notices that the prowlies are all laughing at him. When he stops to look at what the cause of their jubilation is, he notices that upstream a young elf has been urinating in the river, and that he has just swallowed a large mouthful of this. Brackenwood promptly becomes quite sick and regurgitates, ending the film. Prowlies by the River can be viewed by clicking on this link Prowlies.

One of the interesting things I learned from this animation was that it used a particle effect to create the seemingly random motions of flies and other small particulate matter, such as reflections of light on water. Evidently, Adam was having a problem with this particular type of animation, and being an animator and not a coder, had largely neglected that part of flash’s potential, so he went to his friend and author of the book Flash Hacks, Sham Bhangal, an expert on actionscript, who explained in great detail how one could use actionscript to simulate these effects. I have linked the article here, which describes step by step how the particle effects are created, and how one can insert them into ones own animations, and includes animated examples of the effect.

I hope this has been an interesting and informative post. Keep on Bloggin!