Your challenge is to create a 30 fps, 200 - 250 frame animation with a beginning, middle and end using color, type, shape, and SOUND. All due on Tuesday, April 12.
This is about design as much as animation. Let's get crazy and call it... motion design, motion graphics, kinetic typography... whatever.... Commercially, you see a lot of this kind of nonsense used in branding in the form of animated logos, interstitials, and the like. Think about how amazingly cool you can make someone's drab life for five seconds... Here's a link to some contemporary examples we looked at in class:
http://www.designyourway.net/blog/inspiration/some-of-the-best-kinetic-typography-examples/
Technically, you'll be working with symbols and tweens in Flash. Miles lays out these basic goodies in these here videos. Folksy. Important! Make sure you are using ActionScript 3.0 and set your symbol types to GRAPHIC.
Once you've gotten the hang of symbols, you're ready to do some tweens. "Tweens" stands for "in-betweens" as in you, the human, set the keyframes, while the computer interpolates (figures out) the changes between the keyframes for you. The tweens we're doing will require that the drawing to be tweened is first converted into a symbol. Behold.
And for that extra magic touch... nested and instanced tweens!
ooh:
And here is a quick gif of some nested tweens... er, uh, dank?
Working with SOUND.
1. Use Adobe Audition to make your sound mix. Export as AIFF or mp3.
2. In Flash, Import your audio file to the Library. File ... Import ... Import to Library
3. In the timeline, create a new layer, name it "audio".
4. From the Library, drag and drop your sound file onto the document stage (not the timeline).
5. You should now have a sound wave showing up starting with the frame 1 blank keyframe of your "audio" layer. Right click on the timeline and choose insert frame to extend the keyframe if you need to. To adjust the length of the clip, cmd-drag the end of the frame range.
6. VERY IMPORTANT. When working with sound in Flash, make sure to set the sync property in the Properties inspector to STREAM - not event. Stream, yay. Event, boo. To do this. Select the blank keyframe on the "audio" layer, open the Properties tab, and set Sync: to Stream. An event sound will play regardless of the timeline. This is bad...very bad for animation!
Additional pro audio tips (chortle)
1. Cut your sound DOWN to roughly the length of your animation BEFORE you bring it in to Flash. Do not import a 6 minute piece of music for a 12 second piece.
2. You can do some simple fade ups and downs in Flash to fine tune to your animation.
3. Don't be shocked if you need to go back to Audition to make changes to your sound file after you've brought it into Flash. Relax, it's all part of the fun.
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