My Final Animation Project - Project Pi

The goal of my animation was to show people that *some* math isn't useless. There are many professions that use math on a daily basis, but I ran out of time and had to cut it a little short. Math is pretty important in many professions and without it, we wouldn't be as advanced as were are today. My target audience are the people that doubt they will use math in the future. There are some things in math you will not use though.

While doing the project, I learned many things and had to overcome many challenges. I learned. I learned the hard way that to motion tween an object, it needs to be a graphic on its own layer. I didn't figure that out quick enough and had to move each thing little by little, which wasted a lot of time. I also learned about incompatibility. I was working in Actionscript 3, and when the time came to put the actions in, it didn't work because they were written with Actionscript 2 in mind. To solve this issue, I opened a blank Actionscript 2 document and copied everything into it. I needed help fixing up my buttons too. Overall, I think my animation came out okay, with the time allotted. It could have been better if I knew what I wanted to accomplish, if I stopped worrying about the little things in the animation, and if I had more time. Slowly, but surely I am becoming more familiar with Flash.

If I had more time, I would have made the animation longer and more refined. For some reason, it plays too quickly when not in the Flash application and I would have lengthened it a little so that it wouldn't play as quickly. I would have added more to the animation like other ways people use pi and maybe a little more movement or actual animations in the animation. The credits page would have been better looking too.

My Public Awareness Advertisement

For the past few weeks, I have been working in Flash to create a public awareness advertisement, which I chose because I felt like it was a major issue that isn't getting enough attention.  The topic of it was deforestation.  Using Flash to do what I did was a little complicated at first because the plethora of tools are a little overwhelming.  I learned how to make a play button, add music, make things fade in and out, and how to morph things into other things.  I had to use the skills I learned from my coding days for the button to function properly (which was a tad difficult) and for the other three, I watched a few tutorials on the topics.  I also learned a few things about my topic along the way.  For example, I learned that two football fields worth of rain forest get destroyed every second and that rain forests only cover 6% of Earth's land today, when they used to cover 14%.  It was very interesting and fun working on this project.  

Running Stickfigure on Background

Over the past week, I have been working on an animation with a moving background in Flash.  Moving the background was easy, the hard part was making the stick figure move as smooth as possible and as realistically as can be.  I feel like I have not achieved this goal, but the animation doesn't look too bad.  My prior animations in Flash and even in Pivot helped me along the way.  The onion skins really help you when you are making the animation, they show you where your stick figure last was. Once you get to know it, Flash is really fun to use.      

Learning Flash Animation

This week, I learned about making animations using Flash. At first, the application is a little overwhelming, but once you get used to it, using it is a breeze.  There are many great resources online to hep you on your journey to create an animation.  It is almost like Photoshop, except with tools to make an animation instead of just a static image.  Unlike the Pivot application, if you want, Flash takes care of the in between motion in the middle of two frames.  This makes the animation smoother and easier to create.  Or you can make it so that it goes from one frame to the next without the transition.  My favorite animation was the smiley face that turns into a sad face.  The face gets happier at first and then it gets progressively sadder until it starts to cry.  

Pivot in Windows Live Movie Maker

For the past few days, I have been working with Windows Movie Maker.  I took my Pivot animation to the next level by adding music, sound effects, and a title and credit slide.  I also added an effect to make my animation look like it was filmed using an old camera.  An issue I came across was putting sound effects in it without messing up the music.  A few Internet searches told me to save the completed animation with the music and then open the new file and add the sound effects.  I also had trouble getting the animation to play on the Internet.  To get it to play on the web browser, I had to install a plugin.

I learned how to add many things to my animation.  I learned how to add title slides, end slides, music, and effects.  I also learned how to time sound effects and sync them to the animation. This can be helpful in the future if I need to do more professional animation.  Making the animation wasn't as hard as I expected it to be.  
  

Pivot Learning Reflection

For the past few weeks I have been getting to know how to use Pivot to create my own animation.  I learned how to animate stick figures and try to make the animation as realistic as possible.  To make it as realistic as possible, you need to move the stick figure ever so slightly in each frame to make the animation smooth as possible.  That was also the hard part.  Trying to model real life movements is difficult and trying to make them smooth is even harder. However, the Internet has a lot of helpful resources that can help with your animation.  Learning how to use Pivot will be helpful if I want to edit videos someday.  Below is the first animation I created using Pivot.