Week 7 Learning Journal

The things that I learned this week:

·         I joined Lynda.com and spent most nights watching and taking notes during the Flash tutorials that they offer.  I found this to be really helpful.

·         I used a story board format in the development of this week’s assignment.  Each of the boxes on my storyboard represented a frame in a scene. In the box I included details about button instances and labels that were used on that frame.  I then referred to this information as I wrote the actionscript to my movie. 

·         I learned about importing sound clips and using the “fade in” or “fade out” options.

·         How to import images edited in Photoshop.

·         I really enjoyed learning about Gagne and Concepts. 

·         Organized my Flash notebook and added more notes about the new Counter technique that we learned on Friday’s class

·         I learned about what makes my guitar and “acoustic” guitar.

·         I find myself really checking out other videos that I encounter on the web and how to they are designed.  I am developing a new appreciation for these visuals that I took for-granted last month! 

Areas that I still need help with:

·         How to place two buttons on the same frame in the same layer.

·         I need to learn the correct code for jumping from one scene to another. 

·         I want to learn how to animate a line being drawn. 

·         How to use masking that doesn’t completely block the image out.  I feel that if my acoustic guitar could have been seen as a whole object while the mask identified the important parts of a guitar, one would be able to understand the relationships between the parts and the whole guitar.

Staying focused and not getting distracted by interesting information that really doesn’t pertain to the completion of the assignment itself. 

Week 4 Learning Journal

In order for me to complete this assignment I had to watch several tutorials about movie clips and animation in Flash CS3. I created a background scene of mountains because my biker was on his way to the Stugis Rally 2011. He was having a hard time keeping up with the rest of his biker friends so he had to pedal really fast. I put the movie clips of his wheels at 50 rotations in a clockwise (CW) direction to try and help him get there quickly. His pedaling speed was also something that I thought about when I created the movie clip within a movie clip of his leg animation. In order to make him appear to be pedaling at a brisk rate, I made sure that the motion tween was only as long as 3 frames between each keyframe.

I chose to make the replay button on my stage look like a billboard sign that perhaps my biker saw along the way. I drew my biker with a bit of a belly and a handlebar mustache because this made him look cooler on his rainbow banana seat bicycle. I enjoyed the rainbow fill on the paintbrush tool so much that I decided to make his helmet match!

I learned through trial and error about how to understand the way a movie clip works within a movie clip and it finally clicked when one of the tutorials referred to the movie clip parent as a “bun”. Thinking of it like a bun holding a bunch of different pieces together, seemed to help in my processing this new technique. I practiced the Masking technique several times and this new technique confused me because I wasn’t quite sure if it was supposed to be used within a movie clip “child” or “parent”.

Overall I figured out a good way for me to move forward with learning flash when I downloaded Jing and saved screen shots of my action script and timelines from previous mini-projects. I was able to reference them and understand how to script the buttons much easier than before.

I learned that the movie clip in the movie clip does not run when you drag your cursor down the parent timeline, but it does when you test the movie. I also developed a better understanding of frame by frame animation when I started to think of each frame of the timeline like the page corners of books that my brother and I used to create animated stories. Flipping through the pages quickly always made the images move.
The bicycle mini-project was a great way to introduce the depths that can be within a few seconds of a flash animated movie clip!

New Flash skills Learned:

1. Masking: Inserting text onto the stage, adding a mask layer, placing a shape on the mask layer, adding a keyframe and shape tween to that layer and previewing how it plays out in it's negative form: what was covered by the shape is what shows through on the clip.

2. MCinMC: this was more difficult then I thought because it was more complex then a bouncing ball in a rectangle as shown in the tutorial.  I spent a long time looking up other resources for learning this.  I should have placed each of the wheels of my bike within the movie clip of the biker, like I had done for the pedaling leg.  I didn't think that it was necessary because I didn't have any other bikes to place on the stage.  If I had to put more of them, it would have been necessary to have made them children to the parent timeline of the biker clip.

3. I learned a shortcut in animating the wheels turning in one of the tutorials.  In the properties box of the wheel's movie clip there was an option to rotate the wheel.  At first I did not understand what CW or CWW meant, but after another tutorial, I found that it means ClockWise and Counter ClockWise.  I had set them at CWW so I went back in and changed them to CW.  I was also able to enter how many times I wanted them to rotate.  In a previous saved version of bicycle, I had done frame by frame animation for the wheels.  I found that this was more efficient, although quite honestly it looked better with the frame by frame.

4.  Miscellaneous Skills:  how to set the fill at transparent by setting the Alpha at 0 in the color selection pane. This made the background image visible through the spokes of my bikers wheels.  I also learned how to paint with the rainbow colors.  I was able to manipulate the leg of my biker with the free transformation tool and watch it in slow motion as the leg pedaled the bike.  Actionscript for MCinMC is interesting in that you must remember to provide commands for each of the timelines within timelines.  I figured this out when I noticed that although the main timeline stopped as directed, the biker was still pedaling like crazy!.  Using Jing and typing out the notes that I took during tutorials was also helpful.  I now have a separate notebook to refer to for Flash projects.

What I learned while making my Interactive Story: Flash Skills and Rationale

I chose to do my Interactive Story about travel because there are many decisions that you have to make in real life scenarios.  I think that this story could easily be used to help make the connection between choices and consequences that we face every day.  It is also interesting that in making choices we do not have any idea about how our own “timeline” will play out. Changing the timeline around once in awhile would be a clever way to reiterate this concept.  The learner would have new choices on the page or new situations emerge from their decisions.  I purposely included choices that were misleading (i.e. that calling a friend doesn’t always work out).  I also included the cell phone to reflect a real world scenario – so many people use them!

 I originally had a flow chart that had three scenarios: plane, train and car.  However, I decided that if I wanted to get something finished I would have to prioritize which path to create in my movie. The other scenes and paths could be added at a later time (which I hope to do eventually).  I would like try navigating backwards in a story as well so that you can end up in the same place but with different choices.  I enjoyed creating the story and having it finally work as well as it did.  

Here are some of the Flash skills that I worked on while creating my movie:

1. Color manipulation of the text backgrounds.

2. Organizing folders in the library so that my movie parts made sense and were easily accessible.

3. “Saving As” in order not to screw up and not have a back up that still existed.

4. Rack focus on the intro of my movie.

5. Turning the picture into a movie clip.

6. Placing my text (name, class assignment) within the time line so that it appears toward the end.

7. Developing the foreground in publisher so that it would work in the introduction scene properly.

8. Action Script for each button.

9. Buttons – navigation of the timeline, naming instances, using these in the script.

10. Content Labels on the scenes of the movie. 11. Troubleshooting.  12. Combining the scenes. 13. Organizing my workspace.  14. Editing the storyline. 15. Tilt pan in the final scene with the cat serial killer. 16. Figuring out how to script the last scene “hitchhiker” differently than the others. 17. Using internet resources and electronic resources available in Alice. 18. Understanding that the “enable simple button” and “enable frame actions” had to be checked in the command menu before testing the scene so that it wouldn’t loop continuously. 19. Selection of pictures to use in the story – and how to import them into the library. 20. How to import the library from my previous movies.