playing with ponys

I manged to find and download a fan made My little pony friendship is magic flash file with all the ringed characters and preset animation much like the data base for the show. 

I played about with it to better understand how they work and how they help shorten the animation production. 

I did this by picking apart the animation of this talk cycle and chanced it to a completely new charictor i designed ..... this one :

Just looking at all the characters walk cyclical in the show you can tell that they refresh the walk, just changing the color and hair for each character. I changed the color of the character and edited the symbol for the mark on there rear and hair. and this is what i made i made

It may look like a lot of animation has been done, but I done no animation at all. I just changed the symbols that define the character (like the hair and mark in the back leg) and the preset animation was all there for me. This is how a show like this can have so many background characters all animated quickly.

From further research and plating with the animation I learned that they first make the basic movements like this then draw nececery keyframs ontop, for example blinks and facial animation. (even then they save almost every expression they use to expand there library) This fresh look on prescripted and frame by frame animation keep the series looking fresh and very details for a children program.

This is the same animation as above, but with a frame by frame blink I animated on top.

Looking more at the model

I found the Charater was split in to difrent parts. In this animation, everything apart from the legs, are one image only slightly eddeted by squing or rotation. whill the legs on the other hand are 3 sepret frams, being the Contact, Lift up and bring down, then all slightly detected to blend together. Also the curcals in the bottom of the feet have two drawings, the contact and in air.
The legs glosest are also the exact same as the back, just moved in the timeline and moved up slightly.
As you can see they tryed to use all there shapes efectivle and only drew new frames when nessesery, to concentrate on more inportant things.