Kung Fu Joe – My First Flash Animation1

Firstly -Please leave a comment if you think you could take on Kung Fu Joe!

Who is Kung Fu Joe?

In the real world, he is the ultimate warrior of my stick man animation. To others he is a god, see YouTube comments

History

A few yeas ago, I was living in Bremen, Germany. It was my birthday and my misses was away on business (at least I hope she was), I had the entire weekend alone. It was a horrible wet day and for my birthday I had treated myself to a book on Flash Animation (Flash was on every webpage back then). Anyway, I read a few chapters and decided to give flash animation a go.

The Project

I needed an easy project. Stickmen are easy right? I bet the first person you ever drew had a stick body! Stickmen it was. I found an animation I really liked and decided to copy it with my own twist.

Sink or Swim

I had never created a flash animation before, so today I’m very proud of my first attempt, because that is exactly what it was. I remember drawing the background (the cliffs) and then making a stick man walk along the cliff and fall off. Brilliant.

Hours Later

I had several men falling off. Some jumping off. Some skating boarding off. I was getting cocky. I recall thinking, lets get loads of stickmen on there. So I did. You can actually see my animation skills improving throughout the animation. The movie ends much better than it starts.

Welcome Kung Fu Joe

At the time of writing this post, I’ve never seen the movie “I’m gonna git ya sucka” but it’s my friends all time favourite movie and he’s always talking about the character Kung Fu Joe. I liked the sound of this guy and so I put him in my animation. His job is just like in the movie – to kick ass.

The first and last

Honestly, this was my first ever animation. Ironically, it was also my last. As much as I enjoyed creating The Cliff , I also loved building websites and I decided to continue with latter.

Thanks

Every day I receive a couple of comments via YouTube, which I always read. There has been a lot of praise and much laughter (one viewer even said she wet herself) and it’s very satisfying to think so many of you still enjoy the animation. It’s all very welcome, and ya know – sometimes I think about a sequel.

Thanks to everyone who comments, I love feedback – much appreciated.