Amy ArcWelder was my first real attempt at doing some kind of scripted animation in Flash. And rather than keep it simple, I decided to expand on the type writer effect from the original Flash Hacks book and built my own dialog engine. I was also into the character Erin from those Esurance commercials and wanted to try something similar – the hot female lead in a predominantly blue-collar male demographic. From this, Amy ArcWelder was born, built in Illustrator from Clip Art and sketches.

When I first started taking over the marketing side of OTC’s robot business, I was always puzzled how we could penetrate a shallow yet predominated market and get people to listen. Our welding equipment was like the Rolls Royce of its kind in industrial factories – but was priced as such, hence most people immediately found us out of their league. We launched a small campaign around the lines “I’ve seen it and still can’t believe it!”, and promoted it for our trade show booth that year.

And for the record, I admit that the dialog between Amy and her solution specialist is pretty craptacular. Que lastima…

Dialog aside, I’m not sure why Amy never made it past that show. I was a bit frustrated as I had hoped to see her in more, with better animations, and a chance to continue using the dialog engine I built. Would have been so awesome if we could have farmed out some old school timeline animations with Amy saving the day now that she knew about OTC. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Just had no time, I guess.

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