I can’t even recall what has caused me to take up production again on this first animated project that initiated the Friend magazine animated series. Reasons for not continuing production were lack of resources and equipment to continue production in its current state. However, a couple a weeks back I performed a technical experiment in Flash (I’m running CS3 – about 5 years outdated, but then I’m also still working on Windows XP).

My challenge was that I was working on the project at a full resolution of 720p. I decreased the stage size by half, copied and pasted only those resources which were on the stage being used over into a new file, and suddenly my performance issues were gone. Where as before, the file size of the project had grown to such a size that it was becoming unbearable for my laptop computer to provide the memory to process that much information on the fly, by shrinking and limiting the file to information only applicable to the scene in question, I’ve been able to continue working without no noticeable performance issues.

Work on the first two scenes is nearly complete. There are a total of 16 scenes in all for “A Gift for Kathryn.” While I’ve not set out a new production timeline, I’m optimistic that this project may be wrapped by the end of January, or at least the animation. Considering that it’s been nearly 6 years since this project was initiated, it now well time that this project be completed.

Read more about “A Gift for Kathryn”.