TIGSource Forums

Hello,

I'm looking to get into these motion comics/multimedia things, since I work at a tiny company of mostly Flash artists.

I heard of Adobe abandoning flash for mobile, pushing instead for HTML5 or AIR.

Ideally, we would like to get onto ipad, Android, and possibly Windows Mobile.  I've been researching AppMobi and Phonegap -- but know there are myriads of development frameworks out there.

For a technical person, unfortunately I fall on the "dumber" end of the scale, so I was wondering if there's anybody out there has a ready built engine for publishing motion comics already.  If not, what cross-platform development framework would be the easiest to get into the motion comics biz. (Or is the answer already staring me in the face... AIR would be most logical, but we don't know actionscript).

Thanks for your time and attention.

Flash doesn't run too well exported to iPad. On Android it runs fine.

Provided the animations were modest, I think you'd be able to pull it off with the aid of an as3 programmer. But that means no hammering filters or making billions of little symbols. You really do have to be tight about it (for iPad).

Flash probably is your best bet, as the artists would have more control over the design. Focus on Android, then try get it to iPad.

I find Motion Comics to be completely ridiculous, it perverse the fundamentals of comics and add a temporality that should be suggested.

I prefer a lot things like turbo-media (http://catsuka.com/turbomedia) but I guess I'm a bit biased. I also have a project for building editors and players for any kind of multi-media non time-based sequence (there can be animations inside) but it's in it's early beginning : http://artofsequence.org so it will not be of use to you (yet).

My knowledge about this subject is this : you have some solutions provided by big publishers to their authors, there are also solutions that try to do the same but don't really understand the basic nature/structure of comics and goes the wrong way, don't work economically BUT does work with smartphones.

To sum up, it's wild west in this specific domain, everything have to be built. My "solution " (it's more like a proof of concept than a final product anyway - see the descriptions) is certainly the most generic but requires help of lot of contributors to get faster to a point it's useful.

So in the end, it's not yet the best time to do digital-media "comics".

But it's really bad that it's not yet. Publishers just can't be good developers and developpers rarely understand the meta-structure of comics, so I'm a bit isolated it seems. :/

I hope you find a solution.  :tired:

HaXe + NME. That's probably the best way for you to get a simpler project like motion comics working cross-platform. I haven't had any luck getting NME projects onto Android, but my targets for Flash, C++, iOS, and HTML5 are all working very well. Check out the Actuate haxe library for a tweening animation solution. It's very easy to use.

I got NME to work on Android. So I'd second HaXe + NME as well. You can write an engine that parse some kind of markup language ( JSON or YAML are recommended ) in HaXe + NME, and enjoy the power of cross-platform magic :)

HaXe is also similar to AS3, but since it's still comparatively young, it require technical skill to set things up. Though there is now a website that try to help making the process easier for you : http://www.haxenme.org/developers/get-started/