Animation – Flash

Flash CS4

This is the Flash section where you will find project work/productions I have done over the years. You will have access to the final version as well as a brief on what was involved for each piece.

Adobe Macromedia Flash is a vector based tool for designing graphics and animation, as a method of interactive delivery across a medium, such as the Internet.

I suppose Flash was invented to minimise the annoyance of having to create animation frame by frame as a first instance! But moreover, it’s become an essential in today’s world to access a form of a particular presentation that doesn’t take hours to download!

Flash is all to do with number crunching. Any non-imported raster images (which still can be converted to vector-based drawings using the “trace bitmap” command in Flash) has a definite starting and ending point, represented as co-ordinates (i.e. a beginning of a line is at (0,0) and the end of the line is at (0,5)).

The biggest advantage of vector based media allows for small file sizes. A run time engine (Flash Player), then has to translate the co-ordinates as one point to another to computer data (binary), rather than the old fashion pixel based approach (i.e. pixel based would store it as (0,0), (0,1), (0,2), (0,3), (0,4), (0,5). An obvious example of this, is digital photography. The more co-ordinates = the more pixels = shaper the image = larger the file size!).

For those who are already getting confused, you can see that storing a pair of co-ordinates is smaller than storing three pairs. Furthermore, it’s not just co-ordinates it can store in this way, but the colours, the thicknesses of lines, the orientations of objects and hundreds of other properties depending on the vector content involved.

Basically, Flash is a method of storing/representing data in a more simplistic manner. In turn, animational actions (tweening) can be applied to give a movie like feel to the environment. Depending on artistic skills, Flash can be a very powerful and effective program to use.

This is where I would like to explore the wonders in making Flash easy, accessible yet at the same time, create un-imaginable experiences to the users eyes.