2nd Entry

In the lecture we were shown a few blogs as examples. Its amazing to see how some blogs can get so large in regards the amount of hits they receive. Something I did notice was that the design of these large blogs weren’t really any different to the design of our blogs. This shows the content is so much more important the design and something that must be focused on a lot more, especially considering the interface most users would use is the one of the RSS reader. We were shown the RSS interface that would be used to view our blogs, once again showing us that design is not all that important (as long as it’s not blue text on a red background!)

We then moved on to using Adobe Flash. We were shown a basic flash animation on a fish moving up and down with its mouth moving in and out. We were also the interface of Flash and how to use motion tweens on the timeline. I used to have a copy of Flash MX2004 years ago when I first got into web design but despite owning a book on it, never really got then hang of it so to see how to do it in front of me was a really big help although you can’t really get to know the program unless you try it out for yourself. I’m lucky enough to have a copy of Flash CS3 installed on my laptop so I had a go at a few animations myself. I could get them to move on screen but the animation didn’t stay in the middle of the screen when I went to test movie, but it was still a good step forward in my understanding of flash.

We briefly touched on Action Script, something I had not been looking forward to! To be honest, Action Script was probably the biggest factor for me loosing interest in Flash and moving onto other web design languages when I first started out. I really hope Adobe’s first attempt of a new version of Action Script isn’t too bad!

At the end we were shown some storyboards on Pixar’s website. It was interesting to see the planning and the finished product displayed side by side, something you very rarely get to see. Understanding storyboarding may become useful if I ever have to create a Flash animation with lots of frames. The website was a very useful resource and something I would definitely go back to.

In the tutorial we had our first go in Flash applying what we learnt in the previous lecture and following a tutorial on Blackboard. We used the timeline to create keyframes and motion tweens to make an animation. I created two animations, some strange shape moving across a screen and a bouncing ball (links 1 & 2). I found the tutorial really helpful, it enabled me to get familiar with the interface and the basic features, something that would probably be very useful when we start using some of the more advanced features. I had a look at some other tutorials on the W3C Schools website (links 3 &4).

1. Strange shape - http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b250/iridiumcomputers/Strangeshape.gif

2. Bouncy ball - http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b250/iridiumcomputers/Ball.gif

3. Flash tutorial 1 - http://www.w3schools.com/flash/flash_tweening.asp

4. Flash tutorial 2 - http://www.w3schools.com/flash/flash_shapetween.asp