Of zoetropes and tweening

This week explored techniques used in flash to make animations.

The lecture began with an introduction to the history of animation and how the various animators like Disney, Warner Bro's, Hannah Barbara go about their animation. The main concept was that there were the main conceptual artists who drew the key frames or "poses" within each scene. And then there were two other sorts of animators who did the grunt work of the animation - that is 'tweening (short for in-betweening) an the clean-up artists. The tweener drew the frames between each of the key frames / poses, and hence the name. Before the era of computer animation this was a really demanding and resource intensive task (and this where flash come into the picture).

I explored the concept of the zoetrope, which is probably the oldest form of animation next to the flipbook little, and a found a good site on how to build a zoetrope. Haven't gotten down to actually doing it - but I've added that to a little list I maintain of all the things that I really want to do, but probably will never get around to doing. Also on that list is to watch "who framed ROger Rabbit" yet again.

Will also highlighted a couple of things to extend upon last week's lab. That buttons / movieCLips have an event worth subscribing to in action listeners, especially in creating menus: MouseEvent.ROLL_OUT
This would allow us to use an in built method rather than a workaround that has several quirky limitations, such as the one suggested in the lab exercise (an additional symbol that detects rollouts).


In the lab, after completing the tasks, I tinkered around and found out just how powerful the new motion tween is - what was called the motion tween up until Flash CS3, is now called the "classic tween". Reuben demonstrated how now you don't even need an extra layer to create a motion guide, and that panel on a different tab of the timeline panel, where you can tweak the movements with tools akin to those found in 3D-design software.

>> newMotionTweenDemo.fla

I also attempted the extra challenge in the lab activity, which was to create a mask that is both shape tweened and classic tweened, with a motion guide on the classic tween. The catch was that it is impossible to apply a motion guide to an object that is already being shape tweened, because the same object cannot have more than one tween applied to it simultaneously.
Eventually I decided, why not, and tried by putting the object with the shape tween into one movie clip, and putting this movie clip ontop of the object to be masked, and then applying a motion tween to this movieclip. Once this was done, Flash allowed me to set the movie clip as a mask.
At that moment it dawned on me that what I had done was pretty much encapsulation - just that instead of objects implemented with code, it was with symbols implemented with graphics and tweens. And we haven't even got to ActionScript yet.

Rather proud of actually haing completed this lab activity - being entirely new to vector drawing, let alone flash, it was a rather big acheivement to me.
>> lab03-10.fla >>lab03-10.swf

I haven't quite explored the 3D support that is also new in CS4, and it really is out of the scope of this unit, so it - sadly - won't be taught, and I'll have to figure it out on my own accord.