The second project given to us in this module was a Flash Animation, which was taught by Ged Haney, a veteran of animation, having been in the career for over 30 years. In order to get to know and admire Ged's skill we spent our first lecture with him looking at his past work, including work he had done with Film Bilder that have received huge success such as Bla Bla Bla and The Riddle for still unknown Gigi D' Agostino, Kings Of Siam in 1992, and other...debatable pieces of work such as Milk Milk Lemonade. Although Ged did not seem as enthusiastic as previous tutors to be teaching us, he still had a massive amount of skill, with which he could teach us how to use flash, or at least the basics.
Geds lectures were not as structured as well as Rozi's After Effects lectures unfortunately. But he still gave us some guidance. I would have to complain about the poor scheduling involved with his lectures, as we only had 5-6 weeks of his help, with which we wasted the first watching his work (Interesting but ultimately unnecessary for us to complete our work) and the second simply showing Ged our storyboards (I don't understand how it took near enough 3 hours to go through less than 10 storyboards). Although by the 3rd week I had my final storyboard in hand, and had already drawn the scenes on Photoshop ready to be imported into flash on layers.
For the next two sessions I worked on tweening scenes for my animation. I felt I was making progress, slow progress, but progress nonetheless, even with my crippling fear of Flash. The problem I encountered was creating the more complicated scenes. I had created the layers on Photoshop without telling Ged, and so when he saw them I was informed that because my images were more detailed, moving scenes would be more complicated, with his normal methods unable to do what I wanted it to, and no solution in sight.
Ultimately Ged could not solve some of my problems. Needing his knowledge every 5 minutes to finish one movement was impractical in a room with a dozen other students in the same hole as me. So I began using tutorials found online on sites such as Youtube and FlashKit for guidance. Over the course of the Easter holiday I learned a little bit more on how to use Flash, but some scenes were still to complicated for a Flash greenhorn such as myself. In the end I decided to create each frame for the difficult scenes, such as the main character reaching for his sword.
Audio wise for this project, I had the same problem I found with After Effects. Having to make sure I do not include any copyrighted music or sounds. Fortunately it was sound effects that were needed for this one, and most sound effects are in the public domain, and frees me to use them as much as I want.
Overall, I am surprisingly pleased with the animation. It feels like a real 2D animation, one I've hoped of making for a while. The walking animations are smooth and realistic, with both the character and background moving individually. I am also pleased with the sword grab and head fall. I had originally planned on a sword fight, but felt it would've looked too silly and double the time it would've taken to finish the animation, but I feel the sudden cut to black and sound effect works well, with the viewer knowing what just happened. Although the animation does have its weaknesses. For example when burned onto DVD, the screen stretched for an unknown reason, and cut out the blink and gulp audio at the end, which without affects the animation, making it seem unfinished. One thing I would change if I could would be to add more splatter and spurting of blood when the antagonist is decapitated, as its too clean and PG for my liking. The audio I used Is effective in my opinion, when watching it compared to one without audio, It felt like a whole different film, in particular the mexican stand off. I was lucky enough to find a western song which fitted the face zooms of the characters without needing too much editing.
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