Carstairs
About Carstairs
After redesigning the Website using Adobe’s Flash, I was eager to do a short film in the same medium, as a warm-up to doing more ambitious projects. (I have since updated my site using WordPress, so it is no longer a Flash site.)
Having enjoyed watching many exotic B Movies I find that’s where much of my inspiration comes from. Carstairs and Wilkins are characters I had developed a while ago and I thought they would be perfect for this project. The characters were designed and animated in traditional pencil, applying all the usual production steps. They were then scanned and imported into Flash.
I used a drawing tablet with Flash to trace and finish the drawings, but as I progressed, I found I was able to create many elements directly within the program.
Flash has many amazing features and powerful tools as well as some unexpected pitfalls to work around, as it is mostly designed for Website development. Another advantage is that it outputs a very small file size, which is very beneficial for fast downloads from the Internet. (It turned out that flash wasn’t ideal for exporting video, so I have moved on to other products to create animation since this project.)
After recording multiple takes of the dialogue lines in different voices, a story structure appeared in my mind and I completed a storyboard, which I followed very closely, embellishing the visuals further at every stage.
During the production “Carstairs”, many other story lines sprang to mind, so who knows? A sequel could be in the cards.
A scene from the film, “Carstairs” which can be found here: (Flash plugin required) I have plans to post the video version some time in the near future.
Harry Rasmussen
www.harryrasmussen.ca
UPDATED OCT 02, 2016