John Griddley 4

This session is the last session before our deadline because of the snow day the other week. So we had quite a lot to cram into this session. I was quite worried because I still couldn't figure out how to make a button go to different scenes as know-one was available to teach me the actionscript, which in my eyes was the most important thing to completing my brief. So I learned how to do onion skinning, this is like stop frame animation where you draw a character on top of the other character to make it move. It was good to learn but not really what I wanted to know at this stage in the project, which was really frustrating.

Buttons!!!

Seriously, if there were enough tutors around to help me with the action-script then I would have been able to finish my project like last week. What makes it even more annoying is that there was a day off uni the other day in which I missed some vital tutorial time that could have helped, or maybe not. I have just been working and re-working to be able to figure out my own mistakes, and see if I can figure out the action-script for myself. I have also been organizing the smaller animations into different scenes, and I re-named the scenes so it is easy to find each part. Hopefully in the next few days I can have this sorted so, when we critique then I will have something worth showing. 

Buttons!!

I managed to create all the graphics by the end of the weekend, so I began to start putting in my buttons, with the help of some online tutorials. I watched this one with some 5 year old kid, who make his buttons go to different scenes to make a different animation work, it is so frustrating because I could see how it worked but I couldn't understand the action-script he was doing which was really annoying. There haven't been any tutors around to help, or even tutors with enough knowledge of flash to help me with this part of my project!!!

John Griddley 3

Todays session consisted of learning buttons and making objects follow a line. With the buttons we learned how to convert them by going to the symbol menu and converting to button. We then learned how to go into the button options so when you scrolled over it you could make it change colour or even change the alpha and size. I know this lesson will be valuable to my final piece and my animation is based around the clicking of buttons to animate certain aspects of my piece. We also learned how to make an object follow an invisible line using the guides, I think this could probably be useful somewhere in the final piece I make. Next session ideally I would like to make the buttons go somwhere instead of just being able to scroll over them.

creating the stage

I was trying to work with my sketchbook ideas today and try to transfer them onto the computer. Most of today was spent creating the graphics I was going to use for my animation in illustrator. It was also creating the main stage. I found an image on the internet of 'Andy's Room,' from toy story. This influenced me to create my stage like this, as I am trying to make my animation kid friendly. I should be ready to start adding in the animation next week and make start making all the buttons to the different scenes. 

John Griddley 2

I just had my second session on Flash today, basically we just went over last weeks session again refreshing our memories on how to tween and remembering where all the tools were etc. In this session I was taught how to shape tween too. This was quite interesting, showing how to change from a square to a circle in one tween, obviously we could have changed other shapes too.  

Research

Since my last Blog I have been researching what I can do for my Flash project. My original idea was this story I found on the Guardian website (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/23/italian-job-ending-solved) it was a statistic to do with the film 'the italian job.' Someone had worked out the alternate ending and all the figures that supported his answer, it was really quite facinating. They actually had some illustrations in the newspaper as to how it could work. 

I found another article on how much sleep people should get per night, and how it compared to animals sleep patterns which I also found quite interesting. This article also has enough statistics to help me with my project.