WDIM 121

Get the handout for the Banner Ad assignment here. Remember to post to the forum and/or email me if you have any questions.

You will be creating an animated dance party in Flash.

You are going to create a living scene in Flash. You should create at least 3 unique dancing characters that will be nested into MovieClip symbols. You will then place the instances of these characters on the stage overlaying the background scene of your choice. Use a mixture of motion tweens and frame-by-frame animation to give the scene a fun feel. Feel free to also add in any props to the scene to make sure your dance party isn’t lame.

Get handout here.

A frame from a rotoscoped animation

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films.

Using Flash, we will import in video and, frame by frame, use the frames of the video as reference to quickly illustrate the scene using the Flash Drawing Tools. In doing so, we will be creating a Timeline Animation.

We’ll get to a certain point, then play our animations on the computer, walk around the class and see what everybody did.

Attached is the handout for the storyboard assignment. You can either draw your story board frames in Flash with the drawing tools (recommended for practice) or import them as images into Flash. Turn in a .fla file with each frame on its own frame. We’re going to look at how to use some basic ActionScript to stop the timeline and go to a specific frame in class Week 4.

Get handout here.

RSS Icon

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. The RSS Specifications site is a great resource for info on RSS.

RSS Feeds and RSS Readers may be new to you. Hopefully you’ll benefit from using  the Web Syndication these tools provide.

RSS Feeds are blogs and forums way of telling subscribers there was an update, without them having to revisit the site and discover it for themselves.

RSS Readers are what you use to view the contents of the RSS Feed. You’ll be able to see things like Blog Title, Read the post itself, view images in post, and date of post right in the reader.

More on RSS Readers here.

Screenshot of EventBox

If you’re a gmail user, your best bet is probably to use Google Reader. ReadAir is a free Adobe AIR Application that syncs with Google Reader.

If you’re not a gmail user, check out the top RSS Readers for Windows and Mac. Note that there are Linux RSS Readers out there. Most AIR Applications support MAC/PC/Linux and are free.

Top Windows RSS Readers

Top MAC RSS Readers

One of the most popular AIR Application RSS Readers is Snackr. Snackr is an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window.

Adobe AIR apps will work on any Operating System Mac/PC/Linux. To use AIR apps you’ll need the latest Adobe AIR Runtime which is free and can be downloaded here.

We went over the syllabus, the class goals and requirements, talked about some things “beyond the horizon” of the class, introduced each other, and got started working with the Flash Drawing Tools. One of the most important things to take away from the drawing tools is the understanding they are fundamentally trying to predict what you are trying to do. The advantage is speed and consistency of style, as you can quickly draw and color simple shapes. If you’re doing timeline animation, each frame is only shown for a fraction of a second, so precission isn’t as necessary as in traditional Graphic Design. If you want pixel-perfect precession, you’ll be using Photoshop, Illustrator, or a combination of the two and importing graphics into Flash.

Illustration Example

You will be creating an illustrated scene using the Flash drawing tools.

Download handout and example here.

Due beginning of class Week 2.

Week 1 Assignment. Find5 examples of what you consider to be good uses of Flash, and 5 examples of bad uses of Flash. Post as comments to this thread if you can, but you won’t be marked down if you don’t. What important is that you have them ready to show in class.

Due beginning of class Week 2.