Before he started Pileated Pictures, Mike Levine was the Senior Effects Artist for LucasArts Entertainment, where he led the development of such envelope-pushing games as "Dark Forces" and "Jedi Knight: The Force Within." From there, he helped form Puffin Designs with Academy Award nominated special effects artist Scott Squires (Star Wars, The Mask, Dragonheart).

Flash 5's new Director-inspired timeline

While at Puffin, Mike led the engineering, tech support and marketing for Commotion, a high-end compositing, paint, and special effects tool, built on technologies originated at Industrial Light & Magic. In other words, Mike knows from animation and immersive effects creation.

Pileated's Creative Director is Jeffrey Yerkes. After 5 seasons as Script Coordinator for the television series "Seinfeld", he became the Intellectual Property Coordinator for MIT's Media Laboratory. In other words, Jeffrey knows from entertainment.

Now, they use Macromedia Flash for a living.

"Flash is the heart of the online animation industry, and our company's core tool," Levine told me recently from his home in Massachusetts. "Pileated Pictures creates original animated content for syndication on the web and does custom service work for companies seeking innovative new ways to advertise on-line.

"Our founders are combining talents from the interactive world of entertainment software and TV comedy to create the next step in entertainment."

Getting to the next step is very much of what the recently announced Flash 5 is about, according to Flash's Senior Product Manager Eric Wittman. As Web animations are becoming more sophisticated, and new web animators are increasingly fully-versed in creating other forms of entertainment, the tools in Flash needed more power.

Click image for closer view of an extremely simple animation in the Movie Explorer layout.

"We're very pleased that at this point in the Web's development, 92% of the online population can view Flash content immediately, consistently rendered across browsers and platforms.

"Those platforms aren't limited to the web, either," Wittman continues. "WebTV, PocketPC, Symbian, and Sega Dreamcast are just a few of the other ways that people can view Flash content. This allows the widest possible audience to view Flash content. But to offer the largest greatest opportunity to for more people to create Flash content, we had to do more."

Adding familiar options like Bezier pen tools and consistent interfaces are important steps to make Flash more accessible to individual designers, says Wittman. Flash creators are often no longer individuals though, but teams of a dozen or more designers focusing on diverse aspect of single projects.

New in Flash 5, then, are Shared Symbol Libraries, which allow assets from a shared project to be stored externally. Any changes to the content in the Shared Symbol Library is automatically updated across the project. This works to enhance the viewer's experience by allowing shared symbols to be downloaded once and used reused across any number of downloaded files, dramatically reducing download times.


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