hmm… it started long ago in a galaxy far far away, that’s for sure.
age 8 I had a super 8 camera; produced 5 claymations of various lengths and themes.
age 14 played around with Disney’s animation studio; found animation software to be very lacking, but the onion skin feature was a clue of things to come.
age 17 finaly away from high school requirements I took all the art courses I could. Fell in with Mr Swartz, a fantastic bad ass teacher. For him I produced a cartoon, and two claymations all using super 8 tech.
From that point on I was just doing computer stuff, but my animations from the past never really prompted me to do anything, art was not a strong point of mine, and the tech sucked to do frame by frame animations.
1998 I met up with my fiance, and she introduced me to the wonderful world of web developement. Like her, I recognized an inherant problem with control over web elements.
1999 Created my first macromedia based project using Director to create an animation with musical score and picture viewer of my Paris trip. The end result was crude, but a start. Soon afterwards I encountered Flash 4.0, and found it more and less than what Director was, and easier to use. Within the year I was working for Laurie as a subcontractor on her web projects, and trouble shooter/teacher in flash.
The rest is history.
I started using it because I wanted exact control over my web elements, in a format which was universal to the various browsers…