Flash Experience

When we did our first project with flash I became extremely frustrated with the program by the end of the lesson. I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to experiment with but I was hindered by my lack of ability to get my head around it all. The final artwork that I submitted was less than what I wanted to do but it I had limited time and had 'hit the flash wall'.

I certainly started off okay and with confidence but by the end, this had changed. I wasn't able to get a proper button to work so I was disappointed with this. However I ended up getting a 70% for the artwork and I was very pleased with this and a little bit surprised. 

For the 2nd artwork I wasn't so confident so perhaps I was paying more attention because I got the hang of it well. I made an effort to write down some little notes to remind me of all the steps to take and this certainly helped me stay on track. Once I had done the first 2 buttons and movies completely I had the hang of it and could do the rest of the movies faster and easily. This also meant I could help others with this process without confusing myself again. 

I did hit a bit of a road bump when it came to visually edit the movie clips once they were a button. I could change the size and shape of the movie clip but in the properties section there was no alpha option etc. I found that by changing the box's properties it also changed the movie clip so that had to work instead but i'm sure it wasn't the correct way to do it. Especially as we were supposed to delete the boxes in the end and I could delete a couple but for the others i just hid them in the frame to disguise them. 

In the end I was happier with the 2nd artwork and found I had gotten the hang of flash more but I think that the file size was far to big because of the 2 videos that I took with my proper video camera. I chose to keep the audio from one of the videos as it was just a piano playing so it acted as sort of a backing track to the artwork. I also which that I could have stopped each video when another started as all the videos playing at once was very cluttered and slowed it down. I didn't have an overall theme for the 2nd artwork as the range of videos I had were very different and the ones that I could use together in a central theme wouldn't have been very interesting.