Week 9: My animation, a review.

Remember that whole time travel interactive animation thing I was planning? Yeah, well, I did that. I would LOVE to post it here for my imaginary readers, but unfortunately blogger absolutely HATES .swf files. Like, with a passion. Or so I've been told. It turned out decently though, I think. Here's my artist's statement anyway:

Artist’s Statement

My goal for this assignment was to create an animation with a strong interactive component. I wanted people to have to search their way through it.
As someone who is new to Flash, however, this was a very challenging endeavor. I used the resources I had to help me through it, even going through some of the old tutorials from class to determine how I could get the animation to behave accordingly. It was hard, because if, and ultimately when, I messed up, what I did afterwards wouldn’t work properly either. Everything had to be done in steps, and those steps had to be executed correctly. This kind of project, it turns out, is incredibly time consuming, and I found myself working at the computer for hours at a time.
My idea for this project was time travel. I wanted to show various different methods of how people could potentially travel through time. On the main menu, a person can click on an image and it will take them to a small animation of that form of time travel. The animations are not as complicated as I initially thought they would be, but they do their job.
I tried to keep a consistent look throughout the animation, with the same typeface and similarly styled images that I drew right in flash. That way, each frame looked like they belonged together. I used a mix of type and images, which involved a large amount of layers. I also used several tweens to help my animation along.
At one point it seemed almost as if I was being a little too ambitious with the amount of buttons I needed to make this work, especially after Flash crashed a couple of times, but I worked my way through it. I wanted to make the buttons interesting for the user, so I had different things happen when the mouse was over the button, and when they clicked. I felt it was important to add these, because it shows that the button is there, and that it will do something.
The ticking hand of the clock took a lot of time (pun not intended), but I am pleased with the outcome. I even managed to make it loop, by adding an actionscript, so that that second hand will just continue to go around and around until someone clicks on the “Go back” button.
My use of sound in the animation could have been a lot better. I ended up just having some ambient background sound to make it a little more eerie. It would have been better if I had been able to add a sound component for each element, but I was having a lot of trouble manipulating the sound in the right places, and frankly, I was running out of time. I still think it works like this, though.
I learned a lot in creating this piece, because I actually had to take the lessons from the tutorials, and apply them in a different way, rather than just following instructions. You can do a lot with the flash program, and I would be interested in discovering more in the future. My animation might not be the most professional looking, but I am very proud of how it turned out.


Wasn't that lovely? I enjoyed the reaction of the class too, when it got showed off. No one seemed to hate it, at least. Or if they did, they didn't vocalize it. There were a few murmurings of "that's cool." So I'm happy enough. I do wish I had been able to add more sound effects, and to make the animations more complex, but this flash business turned out to be harder than I thought. Or maybe my skills were not proficient enough? Either way, it's finished, and I got a decent mark so all is well.