Incredibly Smooth 2D Dance Animation Made with Flash 8 & Animate at 48 FPS
"This was a nightmare, honestly."
2D animator Brett May, or Mayde, created a neat hand-drawn dance animation that runs at 48 FPS, using Flash 8 and Animate 2024.
As if the Flash part is not impressive enough, with 83 individual drawings, it took the artist over 200 hours crafting everything traditionally, frame by frame.
At first, the loop had 24 FPS, but it wasn't challenging enough, so Mayde decided to increase the difficulty. "This was a nightmare, honestly," he said, "although I did learn quite a lot about jitter prevention."
While I was in the process of inbetweening the animation on 48FPS, I noticed that all of the paths on my arcs just completely broke and my spacing looked horrible. Every single drawing from the 24FPS clean-up phase was actually reworked and redrawn while I was doing the 48FPS inbetweens. I basically did clean-up for this animation several times in a row, specifically for small things like fixing the arcs/spacing on the wrists, elbows, knees, torso, shoulders, and hair. Most of the animation was redrawn just to avoid the lines wobbling around too much."
The animator shared that doubling the framerate amplifies everything that was wrong, it is unforgiving: "one invisible mistake on a single frame at 24FPS means adjusting and redrawing quadruple the amount of frames at 48FPS just to preserve arcs and keep consistent spacing."
Despite that, Mayde found the process "really cool." He used Flash 8 for the keyframes and then moved to Animate to rotate the canvas for more precision with the lines.
"After I had the animation at 12FPS, I basically constructed the entire character one section at a time, just animating the hands for a few hours, then one leg, the other leg, the head, the hair, and so on until it was finally at 24FPS. A week ago, I reopened the file and decided to double the framerate on it for fun, just to see what it'd look like. So rinse and repeat the same process another 700-800 more times once I started working at 48FPS."
If you're impressed, check out his other works on X/Twitter:
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