Drawing Ned Zombie from Punch Card Zombies

I had some time tonight to play around with Toon Boom Animate some more, I've learned quite a bit about the program, but I'm still far from an expert. After I grew tired of failing at new software, I wanted to test out Camtasia Recording Studio a little more. I first got the demo disk at Flash Camp Philly last year and I used it for a presentation I gave at work, but never opened it after that.

I recorded how I drew Ned Zombie in Adobe Flash. Pretty much I just do a rough sketch then trace over that with basic shapes. I was in debate if I wanted to the cartoon to always look sketched out or if I wanted it to be more refined. Eventually I decided to do the more traditional method and have smooth lines.

New Comic

Posted a new comic on Punch Card Zombies' homepage. This one shows Sam's cubical at Zombeets, Inc. and also hints that he's the graphic designer of the advertising campaigns there. I haven't done too much research, but hopefully the internet isn't already saturated with web comics and cartoons about office zombies. Judging by the sudden surge of popularity of zombies, it very well might be done to death so to speak. I'm not trying to make any money off of the cartoon so I'm not really concerned, it's just a project I enjoy creating.

I got to play around with Toon Boom Animate over the weekend. It seems very similar to Flash in some aspects and very different from Flash in other aspects. I think with about a solid week of playing around with it I'd be comfortable enough to use it for animations. I may continue to make the first episode of Punch Card Zombies in Flash anyway since I already started the storyboard in instead of Toon Boom Storyboard Pro.

Flash vs. Toon Boom

So I was just about to get started mapping out the storyboard and animatic for the first episode of Punch Card Zombies, but first I did my daily reading of blogs and tweets that I follow in the animation/digital design realm. I started to notice a lot of blogs about how Flash is going to be phased out in the future, HTML5 is the new wave, .FLA files are going to be extinct, Toon Boom is better for animation, etc. Seemed a little disheartening since I pretty much make a living off of Adobe Flash.

Thankfully, my company is a little behind on software upgrades and our clients still demand Flash player 8 and actionScript 2.0 so we don't have a need to supply the latest and greatest technology out there. However, for my personal animation projects I was considering switching to Toon Boom to see just how much better it actually is for traditional 2D digital animation. It seems like it'd be like taking a few steps back at first since I would have to learn a whole new interface and software system, but maybe once I grew accustomed to the new layout it'd streamline the process. Does anyone have experience with Flash vs. Toon Boom and is one better than the other for certain projects?

New Punch Card Zombies Comic

I drew a new little comic for Punch Card Zombies, it's on the web page. Enjoy.

http://PunchCardZombies.com/