John Keston Classes

Week 5

Session 1: The World project is due on Session 2 of Week 6. After the Flash demo today, I will be helping you with final touches on your sites to prepare for presentations next week.

Flash is an extremely versatile application which allows it’s users to create an infinite array of applications from something as simple as motion graphics to as complex as fully functional arcade style games. Our first assignment will be to create a bouncing ball in Flash. Click here to view a simple example or look at the more complex example here.

New Requirements for the Bouncing Ball Project:
Download the Bouncing Spheres Project Requirements in MS Word format

To create the bouncing ball, start a new document in Flash. From the insert menu choose “New Symbol”. Call the symbol “Ball1″, check “Movie Clip” and set the registration to the center of the object. Inside the new symbol. Select the oval tool and draw a circle. To constrain your ball to a perfect circle, hold down the shift key while dragging. You can also choose to select a fill color or gradient to make you’re ball a little more fancy. At this stage your ball is a shape and need to be converted to a graphic in order for you to be able to apply motion tweens. Select your shape with the selection tool and from the Insert menu choose “Convert to Symbol”. Make sure you name it and select graphic as the type.

Insert a key frame at frame 20 and another at frame 40 (for a slower bounce try inserting the key frames at 30 and 60). Select the middle key frame and shift+drag the ball to the bottom of the scene. Here you can also adjust the height property of the ball so that it appears to squash down a bit as it strikes the floor.

Now select the 1st key frame and in the properties panel choose “motion” under “Tween” and set the ease to -100. On the middle turn on the motion tween as well and set the ease equal to 100. Hit ctrl+enter to watch the animated ball bounce. After you have added a shadow and sound, duplicate the movie clip and adjust the new movie clips timeline. When you have at least three new Ball movie clips drag them to the stage in the main timeline and test your movie. Publish your movie and put the appropriate files on the server to connect your project to your project portal.

Flash Exercise – The Bouncing Ball
Due Date – Session 1, Week 7
Total Points – 15

World Project Milestone 3 Due Session 2, Week 5
1. Show all six pages linked through universal navigation
2. Upload the pages to your server space and present them on the web
3. Make sure that all images and links are working properly

Session 2: Today we’ll be discussing the main Flash project. Below is an outline of the requirements for the project. Please carefully review the assignment. In the coming weeks we will be demonstrating each of the competencies required for this project.

Flash Project – Interactive Flash Animation: "Four Seasons" (4 scenes)
Due Date – 1st Class of Week 11 (beginning of class)
Total Points – 45

Assignment Overview:
For the "The Four Seasons " project detailed requirements, download the assignment sheet in MS Word format. Using Flash as an interactive tool, you will create a 4 scene interactive animation based on the four seasons. You will create 4 animated landscapes or city scenes representing the seasons of the year. For example, one animated element during the winter scene could be snow falling.

Content Specifics:
Animation Length – 10 second minimum per scene.
Minimum of 4 unique landscape scenes.
Design can be a combination of raster and vector artwork.
Must be your original artwork, including any photos (vacation photos would work great).
Must be fully interactive, navigate to any scene from any scene.
Completed project must be uploaded to your OLS account to be on the WWW

Competencies:
Importing of Digital Images into Flash
Using vector tools within Flash
Using Symbols (Graphics, Movie Clips, & Buttons) within Flash
Use of Motion tween
Use of Motion guides
Use of Shape tweening
Use of Masks
Incorporation of ActionScripting for movie control (Stops & Navigation)
Publishing from Flash
Uploading Flash movies to the web

Overall Use of Flash (scenes, tweens, ActionScripting) – 20 points
Design – 15 points
Use of OLS – 10 points

Flash Samples:
http://analogik.com/multimedia_samorost.asp
2advanced
Adobe Flash Showcase

The following curriculum is out of sync, please ignore until later in the quarter:
Incorporation of ActionScripting for movie control including stops & navigation is probably the trickiest thing in Flash that we will be doing. However, just a couple of very short scripts are what is needed to accomplish this.

Stops are needed to prevent your movie from looping and give the user a chance to make a choice based on navigation options that have been presented in the piece. The ActionScript command "stop();" can be placed on a keyframe to accomplish this.

stop();

To create navigational behaviors, place ActionSricpts on buttons. Usually the "on" method is used to handle mouse click functionality, such as "release" for mouse button up actions. Apply the following example to navigate to the first frame in a different scene:

on (release) {
gotoAndPlay(“Scene 2″,1);
}

Also, let’s take a look at scenes, buttons, navigation, and some simple ActionScripting in Flash MX. ActionScript allows us to control navigation throughout a Flash project. Certain "Actions" can only be applied to buttons, while others only to movie clips. Take a look at this example of the seasons project by Corvis.

http://www.pjsattic.com/flash/seasons.htm