So although my animation project turned out as I was hoping for, it wasn’t without frustration. I naively started off thinking that I could do a successful flip book of a volcano erupting over an island, full of smoke and explosions in a mere 45 or so frames. I’d never attempted one before, but it only took about 12 hand drawn pages to realize there was no way I’d be able to do it successfully. For one, I didn’t trace any of my previous slides to make the following one. This was a major issue because the alteration between stills was significant enough that it all just looked like a jumbled mess. Another thing I didn’t count on was how time consuming a hand drawn flip book would be. Each page was about 4 inches by 4 inches. After working for about an hour and only being about 1/10 of the way through I realized I needed to try a much different medium.
Fortunately I took a computer graphics class back in 10th grade and was able to find a free 30 day trial on the Macromedia site. Once I had it up and running, the rest of the project really took off. However, looking back on it, if I were to do it over again I realize I missed out on a lot of cool and useful effects.
My whole project consisted of about 150 frames. Each frame is known as a ‘keyframe’ in Flash. I’m now realizing that although this is much easier than hand drawing each frame on paper, it’s still the most roundabout way of doing flash. I realized this about halfway through my work, but at that point it didn’t make much sense to go back and scrap the whole project again. Still, I figured out that rather than making each animation increment manually frame by frame, I could have made fluid transitions using several of the tools available. This would have made a lot more professional looking, rather than a simple bare-bones animation. I’m pretty proud of the project nonetheless because it was entirely drawn by mouse on the computer, but it would have been a lot more interesting had I realized how to use some of the other tools going into it.
