What are Electric Dog Flanimate Power Tools?

Electric Dog Flanimate Power Tools (EDAP Tools or just EDAPT) is the most popular extensions package for Adobe Animate and Adobe Flash, which drastically improves the comfort and precision of the program when used as environment for creating character animation.

EDAP Tools come in one neat package, which is easily installed or uninstalled, and consist of commands, interactive panels, custom tools and optimized keyboard shortcuts.
All these are designed with the needs of character designers, riggers and animators in mind.

EDAP Tools are backed up by extensive documentation, demonstration videos and free-to-download sample files, which allow new adopters to explore the various usage scenarios and aspects of the tools at a comfortable pace.

EDAP Tools are a part of a whole (Smart Magnet Rig or SMR) workflow, which can dramatically speed up and streamline the process of designing, rigging and animating digital cutouts in Flash / Animate, adding flexibility and better control to the traditional Classic Tween methods.
With professional-grade Inverse Kinematics, chain selection, magnetic joints and automatic clean up of arcs, Smart Magnet Rigs are unmatched in the current Flash / Animate landscape and light years ahead of Adobe's own attempts at Layer Parenting or IK.

The Electric Dog team is actively working on expanding the scope of the toolset, adding features and improving user experience, while always maintaining compatibility with older files.

EDAP Tools work with all versions of Flash and Animate, starting with Macromedia Flash 8, providing power, flexibility and unseen before features to all animators reluctant to move on to Adobe Animate and its monthly subscription-based model.

Who are Flanimate Power Tools for?

EDAP Tools are a highly-specialized toolset designed for animation professionals working at studios or independently.

While advanced Flash / Animate users will be able to instantly appreciate and take full advantage of the added functionality, beginners will gradually learn and adopt many good practices, described in the associated documentation and tutorials.

A brief history of EDAP Tools

After many years of using Flash (since 1998), working with many different people at many different studios, we realized that we had accumulated a lot of knowledge.

We identified multiple areas where Flash's and later Animate's UX could be improved.
We also noticed that all books on Flash / Animate cover pretty much the same basic methods and techniques and none of them goes much beyond that.

Our goal is to improve the daily lives of Flash animation professionals by resolving these long-standing UX deficiencies, providing better, more ergonomic rigging and animation tools, and also a technical and theoretical framework for digital cutout animation. All this can benefit the wider animation community and consequently lead to the production of higher-quality animation more easily and more effectively.

This project was conceived late in 2010 and we had our first public release in the second half of 2011.
At that time there were several other people who had been writing commands for Flash and were distributing each command as a separate extension.

Our intention from the very beginning was different – to produce a unified package containing a well-rounded set of tools, which could be installed and uninstalled with ease. Only 2–3 years later most of the developers who were writing extensions had abandoned them, either because they lost interest or because Adobe kept changing the methods of installation, and supporting these many separate extensions required constant re-writing and repackaging.

In 2013 with v.2.0 of EDAP Tools we introduced the core concept of Smart Magnet Rigs – a unique blend of the traditional Flash approach and hierarchical structures with magnetic joints. In 2021, with EDAP Tools v.6 Premium we introduced the first ever professional-grade IK implementation for Flash and Animate – SMR Inverse Kinematics.
With each new version we polish the existing and add new functionality to SMR, making it the best available system for Flash character animation.

EDAP Tools have gained a lot of popularity over the years and have been adopted by countless studios and individual creators all over the world.

At present Flanimate Power Tools seem to be the only Flash / Animate extensions that are actively being developed with a clear strategy and serious plans for the future. Each release adds major new tools and functionality to the SMR workflow.

About us

Electric Dog – Electric Dog is and has always been a Punk Rock band at heart. For unknown reasons instead of playing wild garage music, the band members have worked as animators, UX/UI and character designers, college lecturers and multimedia developers.

Vlad – Vladin Mitov is a multimedia designer who lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria. He graduated Sofia Art College majoring in traditional animation. In the early 90s he worked on numerous TV productions creating motion graphics and animations on Amiga Commodore using Scala MM 200, Deluxe Paint, Brilliance and Imagine. In the late 90s he founded Electric Dog (ed-multimedia.com) – a studio for computer games, multimedia and animation. Electric Dog has successfully taken part in the development of many games and multimedia projects for Hasbro Interactive, Mattel Interactive, Gateway Learning Corporation, Atari, THQ, Infogrames and Nickelodeon. Since 2005 Vladin works as a graphic and usability designer. Vlad is the coding master behind EDAP Tools. He likes to listen to punk music and to smoke strong cigarettes.

Nick – Nickolay Tilcheff has been animating professionally for more than 25 years and drawing since a very early age. He grew up loving classic Golden Age Tom & Jerry and Road Runner, 70s Japanese UFO Robo Grendizer, the jazzy Jungle Book and The Aristocats, and a mixture of Eastern European cartoons with a very broad stylistic variation. Nick and Vlad studied traditional animation in the same class and in the following ten years worked (on and off) together on many exciting and many disappointing projects. Nick has lived in Australia since 2003. His first encounter with Flash was in the distant 1998 and his constant frustration with the deficiencies of the program as a character animation tool has been the driving force that brought EDAP Tools to life. He loves jazz, blues, punk rock, all animals and some humans.

More information about the early history of Electric Dog, how Nick and Vlad met, and what motivates them to develop Flanimate Power Tools can be found in this interview for the Adobe Blog.
You can also read our 10th Anniversary Mission Statement here.

Caring for the planet – Understanding how bad alcohol is for the young generations Vlad and Nick have a serious trackable record and can provide references from numerous witnesses that over the years they have been persistently and sacrificially trying to reduce the amount of existing full beer bottles on this planet by drinking their contents. Although they realize this is a battle impossible to win, they are determined to keep going.
Ideals exist to inspire!∎