Just found out my favorite anime was originally a flash animation from 2004

I was digging through some old internet archives last week trying to find a clip from an early 2000s convention panel, and I stumbled onto a buried page that had the original test footage for a show I've loved for years. Turns out the creator first made it as a rough flash animation for a small college film festival in Ohio, four years before the official studio picked it up. The animation was clunky, the voice acting was just the guy and his roommate, and the whole thing ran at 12 frames per second. But the story beats were almost identical to the first episode we all know. I spent like an hour just watching it and comparing it to the final product. It's wild how much of the core vision was there from the start. Has anyone else ever found weird early concept work for their favorite series?

2 comments

2 Comments

nora_wells5814d ago

Wait, was it really 12 frames per second or just a variable rate? A lot of those old Flash animations from the early 2000s ran at whatever framerate the computer could handle at the time, not a steady 12. I remember pulling my hair out trying to get smooth playback on my old Dell back then. The clunky animation and the creator doing the voices with a roommate though, that part sounds dead on for those early college projects. It's cool you got to see the raw bones of something before it got polished up.

parker_foster5314d ago

Lost a whole summer to tweaking Flash tween settings on a Gateway... never got it right.