Adobe Flash animation or Adobe Flash cartoon (formerly Macromedia Flash animation, Macromedia Flash cartoon, FutureSplash animation, and FutureSplash cartoon) is an animation that is created with the
Adobe Animate (formerly Flash Professional) platform or similar animation software and often distributed in the
SWF
SWF ( ) is an Adobe Flash file format used for multimedia, vector graphics and ActionScript.[Open Screen Pr ...](_blank)
file format. The term Adobe Flash animation refers to both the file format and the medium in which the animation is produced. Adobe Flash animation has enjoyed mainstream popularity since the mid-2000s, with many Adobe Flash-animated television series, television commercials, and award-winning online shorts being produced since then.
In the late 1990s, when bandwidth was still at
56 kbit/s for most Internet users, many Adobe Flash animation artists employed
limited animation
Limited animation is a process in the overall technique of traditional animation that reuses frames of character animation.
Early history
The use of budget-cutting and time-saving animation measures in animation dates back to the earliest commerci ...
or
cutout animation
Cutout animation is a form of stop-motion animation using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or photographs. The props would be cut out and used as puppets for stop motion. The world's ...
when creating projects intended for web distribution. This allowed artists to release shorts and interactive experiences well under 1 MB, which could stream both audio and high-end animation.
Adobe Flash is able to integrate bitmaps and other raster-based art, as well as video, though most Adobe Flash films are created using only
vector-based drawings, which often result in a somewhat clean graphic appearance. Some hallmarks of poorly produced Adobe Flash animation are jerky natural movements (seen in walk-cycles and gestures), auto-tweened character movements,
lip-sync without
interpolation
In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points.
In engineering and science, one often has ...
, and abrupt changes from front to profile view.
Adobe Flash animations are typically distributed by way of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an informati