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.