So I found this clip recently (actually, it found me – home screen of my Boxee box one fine day this past weekend).  It’s a great clip, Terry Gilliam runs through (so fast, he might as well been running…) his cut-out style animation for Monty Python Flying Circus.

What I love about this movie is that he’s showing exactly how great, fast and funny Flash animation is done – you don’t need to mess around with huge amounts of frame by frame animations or make perfect realism.  Sometimes, animating things in the bare bones is the best.  And it helps if you’ve got a sick and twisted sense of humor.  Best part is, Mr. Gilliam here (one day I would love to have him say to me, “call me Terry, please”) shows how to animate with small static pieces – just like breaking up your stuff into little bits in Flash.  While he had to shoot frame by frame, the basic concept is the same we have now with motion tweening.  This is the best lesson for students trying to learn the basics.

So that’s why I showed this to my class last night.  I started it out by asking, “Who here has seen Monty Python stuff before?”  A few hands went up.  One girl asked, “is that like an anaconda or something?” Another said, “I’ve heard of ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ but I’ve never seen it.”  The one student who actually is older than me rolled his eyes (I was too, in case you’re wondering).  Another student said, he’d only seen it because his girlfriend insisted he watch it (hope for the younger generation I guess!).

Still – I played this, there was glorious silence for 15 minutes, interjected by me yelling out things like, “we can do that with Photoshop now!” and “that’s basically motion tweening!” By end of class, I saw one girl redoing her project using black and white pictures cut out and put into Flash – and a few mentioned they were going to look for more Monty Python stuff over the weekend.