Flash Project 1

EDET 703 - Spring 2011

Design and Development Tools II

Reflections

This was my first experience creating Flash content in any way. As I began delving into the application I was thankful for both the tutorials and my previous experience Photoshop Elements. The tool bars had a familiar structure and I was accustomed to working with layers. Thankfully I have done plenty of audio and video editing, so the concept of the timeline was not something new to tackle. However, there were plenty of new ideas and concepts to tackle.

Each stage of the assembly seemed to have its own frustrations, though none of them major. One of the most painstaking procedures was cleaning up the South Carolina. I probably zoomed in far too close and was too anal retentive about it, but I wasn’t sure how clean it needed to be until later in the process. I was thankful to have learned some of the keyboard shortcuts during our online meeting. They definitely made editing much faster.

My biggest disaster came in the way of a computer crash. After restarting, I discovered that I hadn’t been saving as often as I should have - lesson learned!

Once I became comfortable editing and manipulating the animation, I began to get a little more ambitious. I had the city name fly in and end up in the wrong order, creating a funny anagram (I BUM COLA). Then I had the ‘A’ sweep through the other letter and rearrange them. I was happy that I was able to create in Flash what I had in my mind.

I was excited about the prospect of learning flash. I can think of several concepts (such as a sound pressure wave) that would be much clearer if I utilize an animation to explain it. However, I’m still not sure if the benefits outweigh the amount of time it takes to create Flash animations.