Graphic Project 2
EDET 703 - Spring 2011
Design and Development Tools II
Background Image
Courtesy of Matt Francis Photography
Butterfly Clip Art
Reflections
Actually deciding on what to animate actually took a surprisingly long time (or at least a disproportionate amount of mental energy). I originally wanted to create an animation pertaining to something I currently teach, but I found it either didn’t fit the assignment, or I knew it was far too ambitious for my first Fireworks animation.
So instead I used a nice close-up picture of a plant my son took at the Riverbanks Botanical Gardens. I opened it in Fireworks, which set it as the background layer. My daughter wanted me to animate a polar bear, but I figured that would be out of place on the leaves, so I use a clip art picture of a butterfly which I found as a free. I copied and pasted that onto a new layer. Once I converted it to an animation, I edited the wings to create movement. It was fairly easy to separate the wings with the lasso tool and move them up and down. Slightly more tedious was filling in the gaps using the brush tool. I matched each color with the eyedropper tool before painting in the gap. Here it was very helpful to know the shortcuts (B and I, respectively) which I learned by hovering the mouse over the tool and reading the tool tip.
I struggled a little with layers and stages. I often forgot which to return the stage 1 and couldn’t select the butterfly to modify it’s size or animation. Once I worked that out I was able to have the butterfly start off screen, fly across, turn and fly slightly down. During the second animation, I also had it rotate slightly and get larger. Very similar to Dr. Senn’s seagull, but at this point I was more concerned with mastering the tools than with originality!
My computer (which is a 2010 MacBookPro) began to get really slow as the animation progressed. I tried relaunching the application, but that did not improve matters. I don’t know if it was just the sheer number of states that had to be recalculated, or the large size of the background image I used, but it became very frustrating. I found myself making a change, then switching to another application and doing some other work, and then coming back in a minute after it had finished processing. Even when trying to save as a GIF it took me several minutes - each time I change a setting such as the scaling ratio it took minutes before I could do anything else.
All in all, I am pleased with the final product. I also think I have a fairly good grasp of the basics of animation in Fireworks, though I am sure I have only scratched the surface.