Happy New Year!

Is this the most magical greeting card or what :) Happy Holidays to everyone out there, and Happy Holidays to me. It's been a productive year, with many learnings and changes, and for that I am grateful.

Hope that the new year will continue to be so, and that our endeavors take more solid shape as we advance.

Hugs,
digika

Sea Creature

The Brief
Choose any sea creature and create a short animation of the creature swimming around. The animation must include Action Script controls and two buttons.

Animation Outcome
I am fond of turtles, so I made a cute little turtle swimming around. It's inspired by my scuba diving experiences and colorful cartoons.

NOTE: to stop/restart the animation, please refresh the page!

Please install Flash plugin

Semester 2: Internet Technologies with Dawn Pugh

Typography with Flash

This is my research for the Typography assignment to animate text with Flash. From what we've heard, it's a complete pain setting type in Flash because of its way of interpreting vectors. It also doesn't handle kerning well. The discussion in class recommends the following to combat Flash's font problems:

1. Use monospaced fonts, if you can.
   
2. Use pixel fonts ( and make sure to turn off anti-aliasing); this font cannot be scaled.
3. If using anti-aliasing setting, use either "for animation" or "readability", just choose one and use it for the whole document to avoid Flash embedding the font twice.
   

So I've identified these properties as "safe" to manipulate in Flash:

• size
• transparency
• color
• speed of motion
• placing letters and words inside each other
• using color blocks
• diagonals
• and simple motion on a path

The theme for my animation is Victorian Era love. A Count is finally free to be with his eternal love, and he sings to her soul about his all-consuming feelings.

Some Inspirations
Although some of these were done with AfterEffects, there are still transitions and motions that can be observed and learned. Look past the 3D and watch the motion and interactions of shapes.

Clever stick figues

Stick figures can express so much.



It's not always the dazzling vectors of the animation that capture the audience, but the clever idea behind its execution.