MadLibs

Input Text

Dynamic Text!

Targetting Movie Clips

Building a Basic Menu

I really enjoyed creating this project and hope to make another one but better. This was just really quick menu project to get the feel for it. It was all in Action Script 2.0.
First, to create this effect, you need to create the animation. Afterwards, you go to the end keyframe and then press F9 to open the Actions menu. Turn on Script Assist then go to Global Functions>Timeline Control>then double click Stop. You then name the layer by going to functions, then properties and type in a name for it. You then do this for multiple animtions on different layers. After that, you then create a new layer labeled "Menu". On this layer, you begin creating buttons. After creating the first text on the first keyframe for the first animation, you convert it to a symbol (button). You then press F9 for the Actions menu and instead of "Stop", double click "goto". You then make the type "Frame Label" and type in the name of the desired layer. Note that it was whatever you named it in the Properties. Now that you created the button, you can edit it by going to Edit Symbol and you'll see Up, Over, Down, and Hit. Now, the project before did not use the Hit option and all that does it make it easier to press the button by creating a rectangle around it. This determines the space of which you can hit the button. Now, you do this for each of the animations you created. That was pretty much how you created this project. It's so simple and so much fun. You can create a variety of other animations.

Creating A PLAY Button

Creating a Stop & Play button seemed difficult, but after doing it, it was relatively easy. It is all done in Action Script 2.0. First you had to create an actual animation before creating your button. After creating your animation, you create a new layer labeling it "Actions". You then bring up the "Action Script" and turn on the Script Assist. You then go to Global Functions>Timeline Control>then double click "stop". There should be an "a" over your blank keyframe on your Actions layer. After you complete all of this, you then create a play button by creating a shape, then right click>Convert to Symbol. You then select "Button" and name it. After creating that button, you go back to the Action Script and instead of clicking "stop", you double click "play". Now when you test it out, the button should start your animation. Now, for extra editing, you go to Edit then "Edit Symbols". This will then show you four things-Up, Over, Down, and Hit. The Up is when the button is just sitting on the stage, the Over is what the button will look like when the mouse is hovered over it, the Down is what it will look like when you click it, and the Hit defines an active area of the button. After editing your button, you should test your animation and see if everything works. I was very pleased with how mine came out. It was really enjoyable to be able to make something really simple, but extremely useful. I might just have to make another one later on.


Working with Text

The first animation was our introduction into text. We edited the text by adding a "Drop Shadow". Starting out, we had the angle at 45 degrees. Then we added another keyframe at about 35 on the timeline and changed the angle to about 115 degrees. After that, we created a "Classic Tween" and watched the drop shadow move. We then had to work with it on our own and Chris showed me how to make it move in a circular motion by just changing the angles from 45 to 0 and 115 to 360. I thought it looked neat, so I edited mine like that.

The second animation was another method of animating text. We basically broke up the text by pressing CTRL + B and then added another keyframe at about 35. You have to separate them by selecting them all together then right click to get the drop down menu. You then select "Distribute to Different Layers". If you want the text to go out then come together, you spread them out in the beginning then on the keyframe, you keep them together. If you want to keep them together then spread out, you do the opposite. Then you create a "Classic Tween" and that pretty much sums it up. However, you can reverse this motion by selecting all of the frames in the timeline and right clicking to see the drop down menu. You go to "Reverse Frames" and it flips them. This was fun to do and showed me some pretty useful tools I could use for other animations. It was very simple and easy to follow and duplicate.



The Ken Burns Effect

The Ken Burns Effect is a series of zooming in and out of images while fading in and out between images. It's an interesting editing style that is very easy to imitate. A lot of this project was just the use of Alpha and importing images to the stage. I don't think I made this as effective as I could've, but I think I just wanted to get the assignment done. Maybe I'll redo this one later on when I get better at it. I really like timing everything just right and seeing it all come together.

Mask Project

In this project, we learned how to use "Masking" which hides a piece of the image or stage. To do this, we had to import an image then create another layer containing a rectangle which you overlay with the image. On the layer with the rectangle, we had to right click on it and choose "Mask". The underlying layer then was masked and when you pressed CTRL + ENTER, you could see that the part the rectangle covered is invisible. Upon learning this, we went even further and made it interactive by using Script. We went to File>Publish Settings>Flash then change the Script to "2.0". After you turned the rectangle into a "Movie Clip", you right click it and go to "Actions". From there you then go to ActionScript 2.0 Classes>Movie>Movie Clip>Methods>startDrag. I forgot that we had to turn the "Script Assist" on. From there we put "this" in the Object box and "True" in the [Lock Center] box. Then when you pressed CTRL + ENTER and hover your mouse over the image, the rectangle should mask and make that space disappear. I actually enjoyed this project. It was simple and very fun to learn. I may want to make more of these.


Classic Motion Guides

In this project, we learned how to use "Classic Motion Guides". When using this layer, you set a specific motion path for an object to follow. I'm not sure if we had to create something specific, but I decided to use stars. The one below was just for fun. I figured Pac-Man would be perfect for this type of project and tool. I'll get around to finishing the Pac-Man one later, but this was a fairly easy project to start and finish.

3:4 Moving Clouds

We worked with layers in Adobe Fireworks doing this project. It was very similar to using layers with Photoshop, but more convient for using Adobe Flash. When importing the image after saving is as a .PNG, you can import the layers separately onto the stage. After doing that, we converted each picture into symbols so they can be animated. We then created a Keyframe and then Classic Tween to create the illusion that the sky was moving. At the end keyframe, you just skew the image slightly in either direction so that when you watch it from beginnning to end, the clouds are stretching out. I might redo this one because I did not like how the cloud movements came out.

Magic Wand Tool 3:3 Project

Our assignment was to create a slide show with a consistant logo in Adobe Flash CS4. First, we took an image that was easy to edit in Adobe Fireworks. The next step was to delete the background and then clean it up. When placed over another image, the background of the edited image is transparent. This project was really simple because it was similar to the editing of "Intro to Fireworks". The timing and alpha was the same. After editing the selected logo, all you really had to do was import images onto different layers and create the alpha effect in the right timing.

Moving car

I realized this was the only thing I didn't upload to my blog. It was one of the first projects that involved animating objects. I redid it because the first one was absolutely terrible. I'm pretty happy with the outcome. This had the use of Classic Tweens and converting objects into symbols. The wheels had to be pasted into a new symbol so that you could have the motion into one symbol. That made it easier to move it across the stage.

Intro to Fireworks

This was a really quick and easy project that involved using Adobe Fireworks CS4. The editing itself was easy if you ever used Adobe Photoshop CS4. They are very similar in tools and where the tool bar is placed. When importing the images into flash, the timing was the hardest part for me. After figuring out the timing, it was easy to add the Alpha effect which is how they fade in and out into each other. The text was the same way. I added that last thinking it was going to be easy. Unfortunately, I had to determine the best placement for them due to the Motion Tweens and Alpha. So all in all, this was pretty simple and kind of fun in a way. The transitions of the edits is a pretty neat thing.

Bitmap Thingy

We were taught how to import pictures. A lot of what we did was just edit them after converting them into symbols. This was fairly simple considering you had to time everything just right. I don't think I followed directions well because I made something completely different from what his example looked like. Although I'm not sure that's ok, I had fun with it.

Flipping Kirby

Although I found this to be difficult, I don't think it came out that bad. I'm a little disappointed that I couldn't make it run smoother, but it's the best I could do for now. I would really love to work on this again and make it better, but that could take me a while. We keep starting on new projects, so it's a bit hard to perfect it. We used a lot of "Motion Tweens" and quite a few frames. I didn't create it exactly like the tutorial one because I wanted to make it my own. It's kind of personal that way. I wanted to make Kirby grabbibng a star rather than a flower because I thought it fit better, but I don't know. The random Weegee is just me showing my fondness for that meme. I'm not sure what else to add, but I'll probably repost this after I create a decent background.



Sliding Effect

September 30, 2010

This week we started creating a sliding effect with Kirby. This consisted of many steps and using many "Classic Tweens". A lot of this one was just converting to a symbol and placing it on differet timings. Also, you use the Alpha effect to fade it out. Personally, I don't think I did this right at all. The background is the same one I used from the jumping animation. I guess you can say I was a bit lazy. Maybe I'll go back and create the moving background, but for now, I'm going to post this. It came out decently and that's all I'm proud of.


Jumping into Animation

September 24, 2010

We're starting to animate characters in flash. This one is just animating a simple jump using Kirby. I'd like to say simple seeing as there are many frames and converting to do. Every piece of the body is converted as a symbol before moving it to create motion. We used "Classic Tweens" for this one. I'd say there were about 45 frames involved for this animation. Creating the background was easy after learning about layers and such. When the body parts were created, you can turn them into separate layers. This made the whole thing a lot easier considering it'd be kind of hard to do it all on one layer. I'm not loving my animation considering it's not that smooth and for some reason the parts disconnect. I must've done something wrong in the whole thing because in the tutorial, it looked like one motion. My Kirby animation looks strained and stiff. I might want to go back and fix this one some day.

The Bouncing Ball

September 16-17, 2010
Basically, we started creating animations with 3-D objects. We started with a bouncing ball. Pretty simple, right? That's what I thought, but who knew all of the things involved to create such a simple motion. Using tweens such as the Classic tween made moving the ball easily. We converted the basic ball into a symbol to make editing and animating simple. It also allowed us to place many of the same symbol on the blank frame. I wish I could've animted this a lot better.

Getting the animation to work on Blogger, we had to use HTML coding. This made me happy because I use to love messing around with HTML codes.

First Week of Animation

September 13-14, 2010

We started doing animations this week and began with the basic stuff such as Shape Tween and how to insert Keyframes. Our first assignment involved animated a bird with a sun and some mountains in the background. He then told us to add clouds today, but that was pretty simple. Clearly, I'm anti-mountain, so I decided to make a desert instead. I love the gradient fill tool. Anyways, I enjoyed messing around with the different options to animate the sun, clouds, and bird. The layering helped massively with this project. It was a major thing to remember.

First 3 Projects

September 2, 2010

The first assignment of the year and mine has no effort put in it. The red car is completely lame because I couldn't insert the other car I drew from Photoshop into flash for some reason. Learning about the shapes tool was nothing new. This one didn't take long to make.

September 3, 2010

We did this other project the following day about other shapes and how to adjust them. He told us to draw a tree with interesting polygons and stars. I decided to be lame again and made a simple tree. I might redo this one later on in the year.

September 7, 2010

We worked with gradients and more shapes. This is starting to get a bit repetitious, but I can't complain because we took our first steps into creating 3-D imaging. I didn't have too much fun with this one, but even so, it was an interesting way to use gradients. I hope we can start animating soon, but practicing like this is good too.

Mmm Blog.

 

Geez I'm totally lame sauce.