A few weeks ago I created my characters and did a turn around and then I broke down my main character, the young girl, so that she is ready for animation. I didn't really have much problems with this part of the assignment, apart from the fact that I spent ages trying to figure out what the best way is to draw them into Flash. I also did different mouth shapes and eye shapes so that she was ready to animate.
The next step was creating a proper storyboard (I had my rough ideas down but just had to flesh it out more and get more exact about how my animatic will flow).
I read this great book on Flash animating which has given me more of a scope on things you can do when animating in Flash and it was also great for drawing your characters in Flash. Unfortunately I read this after I designed my characters so I was thinking that I might use Flash for the next assignment so I can experiment with a different style/look and feel using tips from the book (especially using different lines as my design for this piece has no outlines). It's called 'Flash Cartoon Animation' and is written by Kevin Peaty and Glenn Kirkpatrick.
Last week I made my background with multiple layers so that I was ready to do a pan where the levels moved at different times to give more depth. It didn't take me as long as I expected and the thing I mostly had problems with was getting the colours to work together. I think in the future it will be better to spend a few hours before doing colour palettes to create a colour palette for the character and background so that I can then just go and fill it all in. I did the colour for my character first and then had to match the background colours to the characters and although it works now it could probably work better if I planned it all out before I started. Just a thought. =)
So after I did the background I then moved on to doing my pan. It didn't take long at all. I do a pan across the background and then zoom out to see more of it. It was really cool seeing it come to life and seeing how easily your canvas is used as a camera but also how much you'd have to plan your background if you want to do something more complicated.
Today I worked on easing in and out of the movements of the camera. At first I tried to create keyframes on my timeline and do it that way but it's very hard to make it flow and not jolt around. So I decided to use the ease in/out in properties instead and it worked much better. You can bring up a graph so that you can change the pace of the movements by adding points on a graph. It took me a while to figure it out and it still needs a bit of work but it works much more smoothly for creating ease in and outs than adding keyframes and moving your background around physically.
So now I just have to fix the ease in and out as best I can and then do my sound and a little bit of animation.
I'm really enjoying Flash. It's really challenging because you're restricted in some ways but then you can also easily be more creative more quickly. I'd really like to continue to learn how to animate really well in this program and how to make really awesome characters that you can animate without it looking too much like cut out. That's the plan.
Ok on to more Flash now!
Peace out
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