When I was first assigned this project, I was quite confident that it would be easy. After having spent the last couple of weeks learning how to make simple animations on Flash, I was sure one more animation wouldn't be too hard. That is in fact why I chose this project: it was familiar to me, and would require the least amount of additional research/tutorials compared to the other two. I began to brainstorm what my animation would be like. Knowing that I would be needing the skills learned in the various tutorials and assignments we had already done in Flash, I went back through the teacher's blog and some of the saved files on my computer and did a quick review of tweening and actionscript.
Plan
Once I began brainstorming ideas for what the animation would actually consist of, I almost immediately imagined myself creating a sort of ball of other round object rolling down a hill. I then considered the fact that this was an incredibly basic idea, and a lot of other kids in the class who had elected to create an animation as I did had probably thought of the same thing. I started to search for other ideas more suitable to serve as my final project for the unit. I don't know where the inspiration came from, but I just decided to animate a bird getting hit by a bullet. I went and looked up a few other examples of work that people had done in animation to get a few more ideas, and see what was a common element of simple Flash animations. Satisfied with the idea that I had, I got to work.
Create
At this stage, I finally began creating the animation. I started with a colorful little bird that I drew in a minute or so. I created a tween to make it fly across the screen about halfway and then sharply plummet downwards while rotating nose-down, as if hit by a bullet. I then created the bullet itself and sent it on a rapid trajectory from the bottom of the screen upwards. I was stuck for quite a long time trying to get the bullet and the bird to line up and intersect at the right moment to look the most realistic. Lastly, I added some blood to appear at the frame where the bullet struck the bird, and fall along tide the bird. This was difficult as well, but I finally figured it out through the use of different layers. Thinking I was finished, I showed it to the teacher, who said something along the lines of "that's it?" He suggested I add more to the animation, such as what happens next. A little reluctantly, I begin work on a new scene, separated a a few frames of "five minutes later," in which the hunter goes to pick up the bird. While visually more complex, this part was simpler because I only had one movie clip, whereas the first scene had three. Lastly, after the hunter walks up to the dead bird, I have one final close-up shot where his hand reaches down towards the bird. In the end, the animation was quite complex, spanning 12 layers. One final detail remained: the play and pause buttons. I tried following the YouTube tutorial put up by the teacher, but by the time the actionscript was done being written, mine would not work, while the tutorial's example did. I tried for about half an hour to find where I messed up, but simply couldn't: I followed the tutorial to the letter. I hypothesized that my animation was too advanced compared to the one-layer one on the tutorial. The teacher referred me to another source, and I adapted it to my project. Finally, it worked, and the project was complete.
Evaluate
In the end, the project turned out relatively good. Considering that Flash is a difficult program to use, and that the class has only worked with it for a few weeks, the final product is good. It is a complex animation using twelve different layers, and has a set of buttons that can stop and play every layer simultaneously. The story is clear, complex, and interesting. Even though the final product looks good, I did not enjoy this project. I simply do not enjoy all the little steps it takes to make a tween, or even making the drawings to animate. Flash doesn't feel as smooth as any of the other programs we've used this year. I also hated working with the actionscript. It was confusing and didn't really make sense to me. Still, I care about my grade, so I made quite an effort to figure the problem out, and ended up using another source. If I was given more time to do this project, I might have made the animation more smoother at some parts, or added another segment to the end of it, like the hunter taking his kill home and cooking it.
Final Product
Since I cannot actually upload the animation onto this website, I took a few screenshots of various parts of it.
Bibliography
-"Adobe Flash- How to Create Basic Shape Tweens and Classic Tweens." Basic Tweens in Flash- How to Use Tweens. MattFussel.com. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://thevirtualinstructor.com/basictweens.html>.
-Cyphlix. "Play Pause Button AS3 Tutorial." YouTube. YouTube, 03 Apr. 2009. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V2gP93dfxs>.
-"Free Flash Animation Tutorial for Flash CS3, CS4, or CS5." CartoonSmart. CartoonSmart. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://www.cartoonsmart.com/classic_motion_tweening_tutorial.php5>.
-McAdams, Mindy. "Flash Basics: ActionScript 3.0." Flash Journalism. Sitemeter. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://flashjournalism.com/tutorials/actionscript/index.html>.
-Wegscheid, Shaun. "Multimedia." Technology. Blogger, 20 Mar. 2012. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://sw-multimedia.blogspot.com/search/label/multimedia>.
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