Week 1

The first weeks tutorials focussed on getting us acquainted with the basics of 2D flash animation in Adobe Flash. The program is completely new to me, however after playing around with it for a couple of hours I am pretty confident that it will be (reasonably) easy to get the hang of to be able to make a semi decent animation with.

Top things I remember from this week (not including the really basic stuff that we all remember :P)

• Whenever creating a new project make sure the dimensions are 1024 x 576, and the fps is set to 25
• Make sure all symbols are graphic (instead of movie clip, etc)
• How to use the tween function! (awesome little tool)
• Creating a guide line (using the pen tool) in order to move objects across the stage via a set path
• Using the onion skin tool to view movement in mulitple frames
• Tween 'ease in/ease out' tool - we used it to make our bouncing ball animation more realistic by making it appear as if the 2D ball has a real sense of weight and force acting upon it (a real ball would slow down when entering the 'arc' and speed up when coming out of the 'arc' due to friction and gravity, and by using the tween 'ease in/out' tool we can better replicate such movement in our animations)
• There are more, but I have forgotten :P (I'll add them when I use Flash again - that'll jog my memory!)

*An example of the animation we created in the tutorial


Our first lecture was equally as interesting as the tutorials - Brodie McCrossin from The People's Republic of Animation was our guest speaker and he showed us some amazing short animations created by students and professionals.
This is The People's Republic of Animation website > http://thepra.com.au
Go there...Now! :P (After the lecture I went home and watched the Cat Piano, amongst other animations by them, and it was really interesting so I highly recommend watching some of their animations).

I've also been giving some serious thought to my concept for my short animation - I've come up with a few ideas but it's quite hard to confine these ideas to two minutes :S...although, when it comes to actually animating the short story I'll probably be very thankful that we only have to animate two minutes :P