View Allan Dye's Profile


1. Can you tell us a bit about yourself (animation career, how you got started, what you're up to now...)?

I live in San Francisco and have been working as a flash animator and illustrator for a bunch of years now. I originally graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in animation and a really bad final short. Without much direction, I just fell into animating in Flash. Eventually, I helped Cisco create a learning series called "Peter Packet" where I had to invent stories and games that taught kids about the internet. This project ended up being pretty successful and spawned a couple sequels that are still viewed in schools internationally. It was then I realized I had a lot of fun writing and animating for kids... so I started to think about ideas I could develop on my own. About the same time, I switched to freelancing which gave me some flexibility to take time to work on personal projects.

2. Tell us about your animation. What was your inspiration, method, medium?

In my quest for ideas, I actually revisited a character, Jane, who I invented in college for a series of comic strips (which won a local comic strip contest). The original character was sort of a female Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes), who had parents that longed to have your typical feminine sweet little girl who played with dolls. Instead, they wound up with a bug-loving, doll-destroying, highly distracted little girl. I also have always wanted to send up the whole magic fairy land concept that is so prevalent in kid's literature. If you were to go by books I read as a kid, there's a magic fairy land hiding in every nook and cranny. And then, a character like Jane, would instantly be bored of it when she got there. I developed the story with a friend, Steffan Schlarb, and we wound up focusing on her short attention span, thus the title "A.D.D. Jane". Thanks to Steffan (also a designer), Jane's look and feel was redesigned in order to make animating in Flash easier. I storyboarded it, and then animated it scene by scene--in order. I worked on the short here and there in my spare time over a span of 7 months using Flash, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

3. Why do you create in HD? What do you think are the benefits of producing your animation in HD?

When my friend Steffan and I were first writing it, I said, "I was thinking of trying to develop this for HD, but it seems like a pain in the A**". He replied, "Yeah, but wouldn't it be cooler?" Seemed like a good point at the time. But I was right, there were technical hurdles, particularly with file sizes, that I had to overcome. And there are things you get away with in flash at standard resolution that really bums you out in high resolution. So you have to compensate for that. But now I'm asked to develop animation in HD frequently, and thanks to Jane, I have the process down.



Animation shown daily for one week in Times Square. Round-trip airfare for 2 to NYC and 3 days/2 nights in a hotel for two, dinner, a copy of Adobe CS3 Creative Suite Master Collection, and an 8GB iPod loaded with MyToons animations.

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Two lucky winners will receive a copy of Adobe CS3 Creative Suite Master Collection, and an 8GB iPod loaded with MyToons animations.

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14 weekly winners will receive an 8GB iPod loaded with MyToons animations.

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