Evaluation

Being a beginner to Adobe Flash I was always fascinated with some of the things I was on the internet and always had the desire to try and gain an understanding of how it actually works. For this reason as soon as the opportunity raised for me to be able to indulge and experiment Adobe flash I took the opportunity with both hands, however with it being a Self Managed learning plan it did put a slightly different slant onto things. In the past I have always found that I learn the best when someone actually shows me how to do something, followed by me experimenting with trial and error. With the self managed learning plan however things were a bit different and I was somewhat forced to try a new way of learning, one that I was not that familiar with, but none the less was excited about.

I remained slightly cautious about what was realistically possible to achieve in what was a relatively small period of time, especially when you consider that this would be the first time that I ever use Adobe Flash. In my plan I stated that I wanted to learn the basics of Flash and I thoroughly believe that I have managed to achieve this.

My learning procedure was pretty straight forward, first I taught myself some of the theoretical implication of Flash and then I experimented with online tutorials. I found this to be a very effective method and have managed to learn a fair amount, possibly more than I expected. The flash itself sometimes was frustrating, but this was probably due to my lack of knowledge in the subject and technical expertise in the software, this was natural I thought and have found it to be the case with other programs which I am now very comfortable with using.

Generally I believe that flash is has it’s positives and negatives, overuse of it will ruin a website but when it’s used subtly it can create excellent looking and effective elements. Another major downfall for flash is that it is not exactly accessible and is no supported by many browsers. The accessibility issue proved to be very frustrating for me because I wanted the website to be valid and the flash would never validate. After lengthy research I found that there are ways around this and that it can validate, which in the future would be fine, but for the first time getting it to validate was a very long winded process.

Something else that I came across but wasn’t planning on doing so is the use of action script. I planned for the actual advertising banner for the clubs sponsor to be a link to their website and thought that this would just be a case of making it into a link using Dreamweaver, but this wasn’t the case. It turns out that for even something as simple as this action script is needed and as I had not planned to use action script at all this put me into a bit of a situation where I had no option but to look into it. The action script I have used in my final product is at a very basic level, but whilst researching this I came across some excellent tutorials that really intrigued me and that I plan to revisit in the future.

At times I was asked whether my final product of a single banner would really be sufficient enough to meet the criteria and my answer to this would be yes. The fact of the matter is that I set out to learn the basics of Flash and I have done that, but the reason why I don’t really want to expand in the final product section is for fear of over killing what is an actual live website that is visited by many people and is a fairly strong meeting place for an online community. As I have learnt from the initial stages of research is that flash banners often put off many people, and that is the last thing that I wanted to do, which is why I believe that my final product is so successful. It’s simple but at the same time effective, its eye catching without being annoying and I firmly believe it serves its purpose very well.

Adobe Flash within the Industry

Adobe Flash, like many modern technologies has its positive and negative sides and has very mixed feelings towards it in the industry. Some love it and wouldn’t use anything else, others on the other hand are sick at the site of it and if I’m honest the later seems to be the more favourable these days.

The main reason for this is the simple fact that Flash is being misused by people to clog the internet with banners and flash games that have no sense of good design to them. For this reason good designers will generally overlook Flash design and will usually not appreciate any of the work and effort that goes into building something in Flash.

There is however some flash designs that really are exemplary and I personally have great admiration for. A lot of which I have come across on The Favourite website awards (http://www.thefwa.com). Being new to Flash I am somewhat naïve about its full potential but even through general browsing I am seeing things that I would love to be able to some day in the future make myself.

Macromedia Flash is a widely used tool for creating multimedia elements and can generate interactive animations that deliver considerable visual impact with relatively small sized files. Flash content is browser independent and looks the same on all graphical browsers that are equipped with the necessary Flash plug-in or reader.

The accessibility is its main downfall, unlike HTML or CSS, Flash does need the browser to have a plug-in installed. The message that informs the users of the fact that they will need to install something on their computer will put of a large majority of the users and could lead to them not using the website.

What elements of Flash could I potentially use?
As I am new to Flash I will only look into it at a very basic level and hope to get a grasp of the simple methods of working in flash, some of the elements I look to use are:

• Motion tween
• Shape tween
• Working with layers
• Frame by Frame animation

Examples of Screen Design

I first started off by creating a number of rough sketches which were not in any kind of detail and simple reflected instinctive thoughts.

Here is an example of my rough sketches....

The rough sketchs i would then simply choose the ones that I thought could potentialy work and develop them slightly bigger and in slightly more detail. Out of these I then digitised the final piece.

Angel Group Version 1

Here is an example of how I have tried to incorporate some of the techniques that I have learnt over the past couple of weeks. The add banner in the final product will be for the sponsor of the football club (Angel Group). In this example I have used basic Tween motion and the fading of letters, both techniques I have learnt in the tutorials I have done and then combined them both to produce this. The clip would be placed on a constant loop and would also be linked to their website.

Techniques we learnt folowing a tutorial at http://www.pixel2life.com

Fading Letters

Now that I am starting to feel a bit more comfortable with Flash I think its time to start looking at tutorials that will become more usefull towards the final product. One of the final products is an advertising banner and text effects will probbably come into play here.

In this tutorial I have created a simple fading in effect on a piece of text, this tutorial is the first that has introduced me to effects and has opened up a whole new door for me.

This is an technique that I have picked up from http://www.kirupa.com/

Jumping Letters

Again, following a step by step tutorial I have managed to come up with this final product. It looks very simple thats because the effect is simple, but its a very nice way of making things "flashy". During this tutorial I have learnt the method of making multiple items move over multiple layers and also the method behind the "movie clip" symbol conversion.

This was learnt using a tutorial at http://www.tutorialized.com

Starting to become creative

Now that I am becoming familiar with the use of motion and shape tween, I felt that I could now try and become a bit more creative with the movies. I have used adobe photoshop to create these two cars and then imported them into the stage in Adobe Flash. The road I also drew myself and this is an example of applying the techniques to something that I have created.

Like the others, the movie is very basic and nothing really special, but I am happy with it because I feel that I can now concentrate on trying to create something a bit more special.

This was learnt using a tutorial at http://www.tutorialized.com