#prowlies

On FLASHBack the third Thursday of the month has been reserved for long-runner Flash Animation series that didn't quite make the cut for inclusion in the First-Class posts, namely Madness Combat, and more recently Brackenwood. Today we make our last visit to Brackenwood, even though its creator, Adam Phillips, has moved on from Flash to other animation software.   The second entry in the Brackenwood Wildlife Documentary Series, Prowlies, was posted to Newgrounds on 2 April 2019, where, like its predecessors it took the quadfecta of Newgrounds awards, being Frontpaged, Daily Feature, Weekly Users' Choice, and Review Crew Pick. Adam realized that while his narrator for the previous BWDS episode absolutely nailed the sound of a nature documentary narrator, it made more sense to have the narration be from someone within the story itself, namely the Viccan Lemonee Wee. Emma Reynolds reprises that voice role that she first played in Last of the Dashkin.   Phillips tried something else new for this Animation. His various attempts at getting a Brackenwood video game off the ground left him with a hard drive full of unused game assets, and so he hit upon the idea of loading up some of the game levels in the Unreal Engine 4 rendering environment, and using it to generate background stills that he could do his traditional 2D animation overtop of in Toon Boom Harmony. It's a long way from the Flash that he started the series with, and an even longer way from whatever proprietary software he used with Disney in the 90s, but the end result is undeniably gorgeous. And because he had Unreal Engine in his workflow now, Phillips applied for and was accepted to receive one of Epic's MegaGrants. giving him a fresh source of cash to supplement his Patreon income, bringing us that much closer to his return to the main storyline of Brackenwood in the future.   That wraps it up for Bisected-Month Brackenwood. Next week on FLASHBack, we'll look at another animator's struggle with their creation.