Gear Animation

A Flash animation from a while ago, getting to know the nested animation feature.

Dancing Baby

I came across this file the other day while I was searching for something else, and thought this might be good fodder for a post. It was created long, long ago with Flash 3 as a test file for a client, and an experiment for myself. Each portion of the baby, arms, legs, torso, and head, are individual elements put together and  animated frame by frame. The dance moves are supposed to suggest the ‘Macarena’.

Space Shooter

Here is a spaceship and the related elements I’ve created to put in a simple space shooter game I’m trying to create in order to learn both Flash and a bit of Actionscript. It’s very slow going, but I’m making progress. I could simply cut and paste from one of the hundreds of example tutorials out there and have a workable game in a relatively short time, but I’d like to understand as much as I can in order to make the game conform, at least a little bit, to my vision.

Flash Train Scene

Here is another Flash test file I’ve made to re-create the classic Saturday morning cartoon effect I grew up with: a scrolling background scene with objects moving at various speeds to give the illusion of depth.

Flash Moon Landing

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in the process of learning Flash. It’s starting to get fun finally, as I get to the stage where I can actually create what I visualize beforehand.

The most important technique that I’ve learned and show in this demonstration is a nested animation. Even though they use the same Illustrator file, you can see that the frame by frame animation of the flag-planting astronaut is a bit jerky when compared to the moonwalker. This is because I only used 2 frames: a left foot step and right foot step.

The moonwalker however, consists of both a motion tween, and a nested animation of the individual leg and arm elements. The nested animation uses 8 keyframes in just over 2 seconds, so the movement is much smoother.

Some of the other things I’m finally starting to get a respectable handle on that you see in this movie are: masking and motion tweening (the alien jumping out of a crater), easing in and out (the LEM landing and taking off), frame by frame animation… and how to upload SWF files easily to a WordPress blog and put them just where I want them.

Deep Sea Diver Flash

Here is the simple Flash file animation I put my deep sea diver in. I also learned how to change the cursor as you mouse over the image.