Gidday Flashers

Any one for a trip to Seattle!!

Call for speakers

We’re looking for amazing, jaw-dropping work that you will deconstruct, cutting-edge projects that raise the bar higher than it’s been before, speakers with passion to share in a generous and genuine way.

This site hassome great examples of flash in its many forms - they run a festival every year and have the winners since 2000 listed on a page.
Flash Forwarders mission is:

The Flashforward Conference and Film Festival bring together the best minds in the Flash design and development community, in a three-day conference and international film festival. With the release of Flash 8 and the new focus on Flash as a platform, Flashforward offers knowledge and inspiration for everyone in the Flash community, whatever role Flash plays in your life and work.

Movies in Flash

Tonight we’re going to import a movie into Flash and trace frames in the same way we traced the photo last week. You should aim to have at least 2-3 frames traced and coloured so that we can tween between them to create the effect of animation.

To find a movie, go to The Internet Archive and find a movie in the 'Moving Images' section.
If you can't find anything of interest there, then try Our Media.
Be sure to choose a movie with the license. Check the license by clicking the stamp, it will tell you what you can and can't do with the media you have chosen.

When you have a movie saved, then simply import it in the same way you imported a photo last week. Flash will pop up a few windows when it sees that you are wanting to import a movie. Just accept the defaults for these, or if you think you know what's going on have a go at adjusting the options - such as movie image quality...

When the movie is in Flash it will be on the timeline. Now all you need to do is drag the little red playbar along the timeline until you find a frame in the movie that you think you'd like to trace. Trace the frame you want in the same way you did with the photo last week. When you have finished that frame, choose another frame, make it a keyframe and trace another drawing.

You probably won't get all the drawing done this week, so this exercise will spill over to next week. When you have the 2 or 3 frames traced, you need to seperate each of them onto new timeline layers. Once on new layers, use the speech bubble tweening technique on the drawings to create fading effects between them.

If you are looking for free sounds for your animations, try the creative commons website, in particular freesound, which is listed down the left on CC.

Good luck, don't worry, we'll review all the techniques next week. If I can find some time I will create a screencast demonstration of this process and post it here.

Importing photos and drawing in Flash

Hello everyone,

Last week we talked about how comics influence animation, and how animation is a sequential art. We then played with DFilm Movie Maker to create our own little animations, and analyse how DFilm create animations.

From that experience we decided that knowing how to import photos into Flash and use the photo to trace a drawing would be a good thing to know. So I've created a little demonstration for you to use before and/or after class.

So grabe the PDF and the MP3 here that will introduce you to this process in Flash. (Right click the next two links and save them to your folder).

1. Photos and drawing in Flash demonstration for print - 540KB PDF
2. Photos and drawing in Flash demonstration for audio - 3.3 Meg MP3

DFILM, Animatrix, Understanding Comics, Sequential Art

Meeting new people is always hard, especially in a classroom setting.

Last night we made introductions and I got to know where everyone was coming from. I explained my perspective on animation, how it is essentially a sequential art, closely related to the traditions of comics, with the effect of animation applied to simply turn the still images, within a comic for example, into moving images.

If you accept this simplification of animation, the idea of producing your own animations becomes quite do-able!
Start by drawing up a comic or storyboard, then set to work adding motion or stop animation to parts of the images.

Did I make it sound too easy? It is easy! Its up to you how complex your initial drawings need be, and likewise how much motion you want to add.

So we checked out the D.Film Movie Maker and looked at this theory in action. Each of us easily made our own little animations with it... here they are!

Leigh

Beryl

Brian
2, and 3

"The Professor"

Cathie
2, and 3

John M

John C
and 2

I guess the others forgot to email me their films...

The purpose of this - other than having a bit of fun, was to look at the idea of comic to motion picture in action. If you've had a go at making a D.Film then you would have experienced:

• the selection of a background and a stage
• the selection of the characters and where they move to on the stage
• adding in some speech bubble dialogue
• selecting some theme music
• and adding in titles and credits.

So, you should have been able to recognise the obvious relationship that the D.Film animations have with comics. All that's really been added is a bit of simple motion and the ALL IMPORTANT audio.

I hope this has stimulated some ideas.

Next week we'll spend some time learning some drawing tricks - especially using photos. Maybe even some of us will be ready to have a go at making a start on a story board! We'll see ;)

I'm Leigh Blackall

Hello all,

I'm the new guy here. I 'm to help you learn a bit about digital animation. I guess a good place to start is with a look at what I've done. Although most of that is not quite animation. Here's some animation work.

I'm not going to assume what everyone already knows and doesn't, so if no one minds I'd like to spend some of our first night just getting to know each other, finding out what it is you each hope to get out of what remains of this 9 week class, and having a bit of a discussion about animation production generally.

Looking forward to meeting everyone.

Let's Play...

An example of of flash used for interactive activities - have a go!!

Walking the Talk

To warm up tonight we will have a play with a lovely little stickman animation program called Pivot Animation, it is free ware.
First I would like you to follow the link and get some hints on realistic walking, last week the ball this week walking!