"Plaid to the Bone"? Really?

I dusted off my old Time Warp Trio work from Soup2nuts in 2005 when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. And here is a sample of some of my storyboards. UNFORTUNATELY, Flash CS4 is so buggy and weird, converting the timeline into Quicktimes is impossible without creating these weird ghosting/artifacts throughout the animation. You'll notice it in the first 3rd of the animation...this was the best of all the quicktimes I made till 4am this morning. But the only remedy to this is, I found out, is to create .swf files from Flash CS4 and then buy a $1k program called "After Effects" (thank you, computer program industry for making creative programs impossible to afford for artists/directors who are struggling to make a name for themselves, ya greedy jerks!). So, I'm calling out a conspiracy here, ADOBE Flash CS4 can only export .SWF files cleanly which are NOT condusive for internet and the general industry, so you are forced to purchase ADOBE After Effects to create the Quicktimes...hmmmm. I think this is bigger than Enron.

Ok, enough about my conspiracy theories...back to the Storyboard. A couple of things to mention here. It's more of an animatic, really...that's only because I was a crazy person and tried to do as much of the animation as I could get away with in the short amount of time I had to create these, so I could convey cleanly enough the timing and what EXACTLY I wanted to happen. You'll also notice in the beginning the red timing indicators I posted in the boards for the simple arm movements...I abandoned that pretty quickly since it was creating more work than necessary. I should also mention what this is about, give you the backstory. This show is called "Time Warp Trio" which only had 1 season on Discovery Kids. The show is based on the children's books "Time Warp Trio" which centers around 3 kids who obtain a magical time traveling book from one of the kids' uncle. The show itself expanded on the idea and created 3 more kids, the boy's great granddaughters from 100 years in the future who are named similarly but have opposing personalities. In this scene (actually this is a composite of 3 scenes) we have the leader of the kids, Joe, his sister, Anna, his Great Granddaughter Jodie, and his magician-Uncle Joe (the previous owner of the book) having a victory feast in 1338 Scotland with Lady Agnes Dunbar ("Black Agnus") as they plan on how they need to survive a continuing onslaught by the English. And Jodie unwillingly volunteers to sneak through the enemy camp to go find help. I enjoyed the back and forth quick camera pans between the bickering family members in this scene and the overall dread that Jodie is overcome with as she just steadily grows worse and worse with fear about her daunting task at hand.