Sunday, September 28, 2008

NEW WRITE UP!!!

This has got to be the longest I've ever worked on an animation. I totally thought everything was just going to be simple and just done in a snap. NOPE! I ultimately fixed the dragging and dropping issues and updated the look of the animation. The one thing I can't figure out is why is it not really playing the movies smoothly. SCRATCHE THAT I FIGURED IT OUT AND I'M HAPPY!

Animation: Full Size



Thursday, September 25, 2008

Final Actionscript Test

Animation:Full Size





Overall I didn't think this process was going to take this long for an animation. Oh well I was able to complete it with some good results I assume. The movie is dedicated to my man Jordan and his inspiring ninja animation. It took a while to storyboard out and figure out how to do everything correctly but once I got into the groove it was smooth sailing. More time management is needed.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Quiz 2

Explain what the difference between an event handler and a frame event?

To my knowledge the difference between an event handler and a frame event is a event handler occurs differently than the frame event. The frame event consists of that particular symbol or instance having its own source of animation/code. While the event handler deals more with executing a particular function with code. The best way I can put it responds to the two primary events in actionscripting : 1. Events related to the timeline.
2. Events associated with frames in the timeline.

Write Up and .swf Files

Action Script Lesson:



Action Script Write Up:
For the actionscript lessons I tried to keep it simple due to some tight time constrictions with NPDA. Overall the whole experience was challenging since I don't know a lot about action scripting yet but what I did achieve made me very happy at least. I'm going to revise these lessons later on to improve on my the animations. The shit is just tricky about certain functions.

Revised(a little) Digiscape:
Animation: Full Size


Thursday, September 18, 2008

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Digital Scape Write Up Final

Animation:Full Size




Woo. I'm pretty happy with the results that I have from my final animation of my digiscape. It has been a long journey from sketch to fully animated form. I ran into a lot of problems when animating some of my elements because majority of what I wanted to do could only be done with the help of action scripting. I think it would've been a nice element with the aid of action scripting to have different particles of the spore launching around screen when clicked on the stage. I feel that there is still some much needed tweaking to be done on the timing of each element as they move from frame to frame. Something that will allow the transition to be a little smoother. I planned big and although I didn't get it personally there with all the big movie star effects I wanted...I still had to tell myself this is suppose to be a basic animation showing our knowledge of the lessons. The one thing I regret not including was the shadows as the suns roll by. I tried to get those right but it just looked as if the shadow transitions were too choppy. If you have any ideas on how I may be able to fix this then please tell me.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Assignment Write Up For Animation

When I was working on the animation the trouble that I was having with completing it was that whenever I made the suns rotate around each other they didn't carry this feeling of being mechanical. The suns seemed to just stick to the path and feel too preschool animation. The one thing that I did enjoy about finding out thanks to my search of http://www.phong.com is a flash actionscript portal site that helped me figure out how to achieve the effect of a meteor shower. The meteor shower will be on a controlled loop in the background and I'm trying to find a script that will help with randomizing the shots across the sky. Another thing that I found useful from the portal site is a script that'll allow me to change my cursor into the dust(spores). The next step is to create clickable mounds in the foreground so it'll animate the spores digging into the mounds to make the new plant life that will show the creation of the dust particles.

Animation: http://megaswf.com/view/8159194800ebdd8d77b801c89abe39c5.html

Quiz No. 1

Question 1: What is the difference between a symbol and an instance?
Question 2: What is the difference between a frame with an empty circle and a frame with a black circle?
Question 3: What are two of the main reasons people use Flash?
Question 4: You can only motion tween a __________.
Question 5: If you select an object how can you tell a shape versus a symbol?

Answer 1:A symbol is basically a graphic that can be animated using the regular functions of Flash such as motion tween, shape tween, motion guide, and etc. An instance is the symbol but like multiple parts of the symbol like copies.

Answer 2:The difference between a frame with an empty circle and a frame with a black circle is that the frame with the empty white circle is a blank keyframe that has no information on it ready to animate. The black circle on the frame means there is stored information in that frame and it is called a keyframe.

Answer 3:One of the main reasons people use Flash is to code actionscripts with the program that allows animations to be more fluid. Another reason people use Flash is to create animated interfaces that viewers can interact with.

Answer 4:You can only motion tween a symbol or graphic.

Answer 5: You can tell the difference between a shape and a symbol because when you click on a shape it highlights the whole object in little dots that look like halftones. When you click on a symbol the whole object is selected with the outline and it doesn't include the little dots.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Monday, September 1, 2008

9/2/08 Question and Write Up

After reading the article a couple of times now I feel like I have this burning question about why is it still so hard to find a place to exhibit net.art work? I mean in this day and age we have access to the internet through everything in our homes and I feel the next generation of artists will have the ability to tap into these devices and exhibit work. Sort of like Heath Bunting and his work with the phone booths. That was brilliant why can't we as computer savvy artists be able to do something like that. Nothing is really stopping us other than scared corporations who don't want any kind of open sourcing of their code. What do they have to hide?

Write Up:
Starting off after receiving the assignment I knew that I wanted to make a surreal/alien landscape. I found inspiration in artists that I had on file in my personal library at home. Tim Biskup, Mars-1, David Choe, and Jeff Soto were some of the artists I wanted to sort of mimic in style and color. While working on developing the digiscape I found that I couldn't exactly get my piece to be what I totally wanted it to be because I wanted to keep in mind we have to animate an aspect of it. By eliminating several elements of the sketch I could focus more on polishing up my environment. Hopefully by the time I go to animate the digiscape I can add elements over it in Flash instead of drawing them up in Illustrator and placing them.

Digiscape: