Assignment 3
Activity 4.3: Animated car (12 FPS, 28kb)
The animated car activity was much easier to achieve in Flash than in Fireworks as an animated gif. The timeline in Flash allowed me to have more control over when the images appear. Also Flash can apply easing to demonstrate that a motion slows down before stopping or accelerates after starting. The motion tweens in Flash make it simple to allow the cars to accelerate evenly across the timeline.
I extended the activity from the tutorial notes to include the car breaking down and a tow truck coming to tow it away. Adding more graphics and sounds to the timeline made it another challenge to keep under the file limit. I achieved this by using the tow truck sound twice and reducing it to 11kHz 2bit mono. It is a low quality sound however because it is a noisy tow truck the quality does not detract from the completed movie. The motion tweening allowed me to animate the tow rope extending down to the red car to tow it away. An easing of 10 was given to the the car as it accelerated away from the camping area and the tow truck when it arrived and when it departed. What this does is move the progressions on the motion tween closer together as the car moves away and accelerates or comes in to stop. This makes for a more realistic look to a motion.
Flash makes it easy to edit your sound file. By right clicking on the sound in the library you have a choice to go to your audio editing tool which quickly allows you to alter the sound length. Simple actionscript was applied to ensure the movie or sound did not loop.
Originally I had no preloader on this movie. Because the file size is very small this should not be a problem. When loading swf files on slow internet speeds problems can occur with timing of animation and sound. After hearing Lesley's swf and noticing the sound and image on first play did not co-ordinate, I decided that even small swf files need preloaders to ensure all assets are loaded and ready to play when required.
Go to Activity 4.4