Backgrounds

I wouldn't find so many difficulties if I had designed my character directly in Flash, but for me this was one of the most important things to learn, how to take the most advantage of design software, to animate stylised characters and landscapes. As an illustrator I give the same importance to the graphics than the movement.

I've found some problems of compatibility between Flash and illustrator. Some of my designs were altered once imported and some other takes ages to paste in. In the beginning I though there was a problem with the new elliptical gradient tool of illustrator, maybe Flash was not able to read it. But finally with my mentor we realise that the troubles come from the pixel textures that I linked to the characters.

The other major problem was caused by the backgrounds. When you're working with pixel art, you're always afraid of pixelation in the close ups, that's why I create massive backgrounds in high resolution. You should optimise your images before importing to AE, and you should know exactly the zooms and motion of the cam.