WEEK 7

This week, we touched on the basics of Macromedia Flash 8!

For starters Ms Nah showed us what a Flash file was and what the program could do. Then it was up to us to read the introduction off OLE and play around with the software. I never touched on ANYTHING to do with Flash before, but it was all rather interesting.

The simple animation wasn't too simple for me at first, but soon enough, I got the ball rolling! (LITERALLY!) Realised it was all about the converting to symbols and just pulling the ball to different positions on the board at different time-frames. I got even more excited when my ball could bounce, and to end it all, I made a second ball bounce across the screen at the same time then both merging and disappearing! Oh, the satisfaction! But I got a bit disheartened when I saw people around me morphing their circles into squares and funny faces! Oh well. This wasn't their first time!

Next, we had to do a Flash banner. Ms Nah said it was all about understanding the frames and stuff. Honestly I started getting a little confused from here onwards. Unlike the first exercise, we had to overlap two different banners. There was a lot of Motion Tweening and time-frame adjusting to be done to get the blinking and cool effects. But truth be told, I DID IT! Yes, I think my banner looked pretty cool too! (:

Finally, the last task was making a spotlight effect on the Singapore Zoological Gardens' Logo. I think this was the COOLEST ONE OF ALL! I barely grasped the concept of all the layers and masking, but still I managed make a spotlight! We had to make 3 main layers. First layer was the coloured logo, then the black and white logo and finally the layer of a circle that was to be the spotlight. The spotlight layer was rather similar to the first exercise where we had to roll the ball around. And with the patience and help of my wonderful lab partner Syawal and Ms Nah, I MADE A SPOTLIGHT ANIMATION EFFECT!

I think Flash is a rather tedious but the results sure make it all worthwhile! Kinda hope to learn more interesting Flash tricks. WEE

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
(and happy reading too Ms Nah! CHEERS)