A Day in the Life of Id Part 1 - a film noir cartoon animation

When I was a kid (after seeing the Mickey Mouse shorts and films like Fantasia, The Jungle Book, and Snow White) I had dreams of growing up to become an animator for Disney. I actually held on to the dream until some time in high school when I pursued a passion for cinematography and special effects and truly began studying the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, and the Film Noir movies of the 1940s. I have since allowed the aspiration to become a cinematographer to fade, but I still find myself entertaining the idea of making cartoons from time to time.


About a 10 months ago I discovered Newgrounds.com (a site devoted to Flash cartoons and games). After looking at a couple hundred independently created animations, I decided it was time to brush up on my Flash animation skills once again. It was a chilly and boring October weekend, so I figured I'd try to create a short film noir styled animation. I sketched out a quick one-page storyboard and set about creating an animation using Adobe Flash CS3 that revolved around a main character named Id (taken from the term used by Freud in his structural model of the psyche for the unorganized part the personality structure that contains the basic drives). The idea was that he would have a number of bizarre encounters on his way to the local convenience store.


For the first part, I dug out an old animation idea I had roughed out for a former roommate back in 2000. He had intended to create a public access show called "Flaming Stickman" and wanted a short intro animation of a stick man bursting into flames and running across the screen that would fade into the logo of a pedestrian crossing sign where the stick figure was on fire. The show never happened and I later moved out of the place we were sharing, so the test animation sat unused on an old Zip disk for quite some time collecting virtual dust. I finally found a use for it 8 years later.


By the end of the weekend, I had completed 30 seconds of the story idea I had formulated, complete with backing music from my days as an aspiring musician. I decided to label it as "Part 1" with the intent of creating the rest of the animation in a series of future parts.


So here it is.

Part One of A Day in the Life of Id