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.
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