The little gingerbread man in this was actually my first ever stroke drawn in Flash, how many people can say they still have that! I remember making the first outline then adding a frame and a second outline -- just to see how a simple animation would look. Playing it was amazing -- it was already practically dancing (this was literally minute 2!). So began eight years of addiction. The gingerbread man eventually evolved into a full animation that was entered in the RealFlash Animation Festival. Someone had asked about it last month and I thought it was lost, but Sandy found it on some dusty backup cd, yay! He is the definitely the one that turned me on to Flash so big debt there-- in fact I only came even last year, discovering Rilo Kiley before him (so thank god for Jenny Lewis).

Have a look if you like (there is no preloader due to the realPlayer not allowing actions, so you may have better luck downloading).   play   download

Flash had no MP3 sound back then, so streaming animation on the web required the RealPlayer. It was a weird mix though, because if the bandwidth couldn't keep up the RealPlayer would drop symbol definitions. This caused the whole animation to play with a characters head or arm missing! The guidelines for the fesitval were a maximum 20 Kbps with the preload no longer than 20 seconds, but in reality you wanted to be even lower than these - a great habit to get into early. I also remember not knowing that you could reuse layers in Flash, so every symbol I entered ended up on its own layer. The final animation was like 1500 frames long, and over 1000 layers deep, yikes.

It certainly looks dated and jerky now, but it does bring back a wee bit of that totally empowering feeling you would get when first publishing animation on the net. The world was still getting used to being able to publish a newsletter from home, and suddenly you could make your own movies and distribute them for basically no cost, from your living room. In your gitch no less. Hell of a bullhorn, even today, lest we forget.

PS That song was from a file called 'TheAnglers.midi“ and I've never been able to figure out more than that. If anyone knows more about the tune I'd REALLY love to hear the details!

PPS The idea of the poem is you had to change one letter in each word for each line, which explains the few forced spellings ; ).