We’re having a great time making Kappa Mikey in New York. There are people here from all over the country working on it. New Yorkers have this strange sense of humor so the show is pretty funny and weird. I use my laptop to animate Mikey in the studio and also during my long commute on the train. All of the animation is done on computers. I use a program called Flash for drawing the animation. It’s an easy program to learn. People sometimes have the idea that Flash has a certain look. But the animators on this show all have fine arts training and go to great lengths to do their work in traditional ways. We don’t use tweens or the tricks that have become a cliché with Flash. The animators on Mikey are divided into two camps, since the show is a parody on Japanese Animè and also features an American style main character. We use different methods to show the difference between the characters. The animè is done with a beautiful thin line and fine detail, while Mikey uses bold shapes and broad action. By using Flash, an animator can cover a lot of ground in a day. It’s a wonderful way to work because you can see your animation grow as you create it. You could never get this close to your work when you animated with pencil and paper. Besides Flash for animating, we also use Maya to build props and background settings. Then the work of finishing the episodes is done with programs like Final Cut and After Effects. It’s pretty amazing to think that if wanted to, you could actually make an entire TV show on your laptop using this software.

People liked to draw animation even before film was invented, and this has always fascinated me. As early as 1832 you could find these discs that you would spin in front of a mirror which actually show the action of a series of drawings. The Mikey viewer that you can download here is a Phenakistoscope similar to the optical toys people played with in the 19th century, although nobody ever had discs with Mikey on them. The instructions are on the sheets that you download. You view the animation by cutting out the disc and the thin slits. Then you stick it onto a pencil or a chopstick and spin the disc in front of a mirror, viewing the animation through the cut-out slits.

Click on the SWF below to view all three :

You can create your own, click on the links below and then print them!

Mikey Phenakistoscope 1
Mikey Phenakistoscope 2
Mikey Phenakistoscope 3

I made this Mikey clock to show what else you can do with Flash. Download it and keep it on your desktop. Kappa Mikey has been really a great project to work on, and we hope you have as much fun with it as we do.

Download for Windows
Download for MAC OS X

- John Conning