Fluttershy's FlutterSurprise

Have you ever had that one instance in your life when something so embarrassingly unexpected happens to you that all you want to do is go crawl in a hole somewhere? Luckily for Fluttershy, she has some really awesome friends to back her up in an embarrassing situation. Here Fluttershy is, out at a natural park somewhere in Ponyville enjoying a very nice lunch out beside a small river with Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash. Fluttershy and her friends stand at a cloth covered round picnic table, sipping away on their beverages. That is, until the unexpected occurs.

This is my second animation and HOLY SWEET MOTHER OF CELESTIA WAS THIS EVER A PAIN TO CREATE! I was only originally going for another 15 second animation, but I ended up doing one that runs for 78 seconds (1 minute, 18 seconds) and took me about 3 months of off and on work with about an hour or two a day to work on it. It took me a lot longer than it should have to make this. Would’ve been done with it a very long time ago, but Flash decided to be a big BRAT this time around. I had to fix many things along the way. Exports into .swf kept messing up some of the smallest objects and symbols. I managed to correct those crazy errors for the most part and I’m soooooo glad to be finally finished with this. I did learn a few new tricks along the way with this project, so the next animation I do shouldn’t take me anywhere near as long to complete.

Some of the animated elements in this are…..

1. Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy (where a good 80% or so of the animation is taking place…details details details..)

2. A Colta-Cola bottle. I know I’m not the first to think of ‘Colta-Cola’ (someone beat me to it by a couple of months) but I do believe I’m the first to animate one. I designed the logo so that the letter “L” and “T” in “Colta” flowed with the rest of the original logo (also made sure my design didn’t look exactly the same as the few that are already out there by other artists here on dA.) I’ve also made it so that you can see the carbonation inside the bottle moving around. And, of course, the emptying of the liquid contents of that bottle.

3. The juice drinks Twilight and Dash have. I’ve animated the liquid contents of those to empty a bit as well.

4. A rainbow that comes and goes at the beginning of this animation.

5. The massive planet quake visible from space.

6. The moving water in the river.

7. A yellow bird flying around at the beginning.

8. The Fluttershy Start Button at the very beginning of this animation. She changes her expression once when you move your mouse over her. Her expression changes again (for a split second) when you click on her to start the flash video.

9. And lastly, I guess the entire background could be considered as being animated, since the entire thing is being moved to show camera movement at the beginning of the animation. The rest of the camera movements from that point on were done using a vcam.

I have no idea what I’ll do for my next animation. So in the meantime, I realized I haven’t done just a regular piece of fan art with Rainbow Dash yet. So I may do that next until I decide what to do for another animation. Just have to wait and see what inspiration will hit me with next. Enjoy!


Character Designs © Lauren Faust
MLP FiM Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, ©Hasbro
©WildAnime