Crowded Wisdom

A Mac pumpkin…  I couldn’t resist! 

Flash is an amazing authoring environment, able to combine both artistic creativity and sophisticated mathematical programming skills. At it simplest, Flash lets you draw stuff using a rather clever use of vector graphics that can scale gracefully to any resolution, and it also has incredible depth that lets those who want to challenge their skills to explore the world of Actionscripting to bring high levels of interactivity to the objects it creates.

One great example of this dual personality that Flash has is shown in this amazing animated page. Check it out… sure, it’s purely entertainment value but it’s very cool.

Of course, for a more corporate use of Flash, you can’t go past Inside the House, a wonderful virtual tour of the Sydney Opera House. Although this site has been around for a few years now, I think it’s a good use of Flash that goes beyond just using Flash for entertainment value and makes good use of interactivity to meet a corporate purpose.

What other cool, but useful, sites have you found that use Flash? Tell me about them in the comments…

Thought you guys might enjoy this short video of our pumpkin carving…

(Has anyone figured out how to embed the YouTube videos into these blog pages?  The normal way doesn’t seem to work?  Is there some trick that works?)

This is the marking rubric for the Flash cartoon. Take a look at it and make sure you’ve demonstrated your ability in each of the four basic areas, according to the criteria I’ve given you.

Just a note about how I’d like you to submit your finished Flash cartoon.

Once you’re finished the whole thing, you need to make sure it’s saved as a FLA file and safely saved to your personal drive on the school network.  This is your own copy of your work.

What I want you to give me is a finished SWF file that has been exported out of Flash.  Save the file using your own name as the filename, in the format firstnamelastname.swf, using all lowercase characters.

Submit the file to me as an email attachment and send it to betcherc@hcdsb.org with “Flash Cartoon” in the subject line.

Add a copy of the finished cartoon to your blogpage.

Don’t forget the original blog about your thoughts on communication.  It counts!

Remember the KISS Principle?  Keep It Simple, Stupid!  That’s not bad advice as you start to really get into your Flash cartoons…   Try to simplify your cartoon down to the essentials… keep the characters simple, the backgrounds simple, minimise the movements your characters have to make, etc.

You only need enough to communicate the story - don’t overcomplicate things too much.  Think Southpark, not The Incredibles.

Ok, here it is, your next assessment task… I’ve tried to keep it simple.

1. Do some browsing around the web (some teachers might call it research, but I like to call it browsing) and check out as many ideas as you can about the concept of “Communication“.

2. Write a substantial blog post that explores some of these ideas, especially your response to what you’ve found. I don’t want you to tell me what you found… I want you to tell me what you think about what you found. Give me some viewpoints on what it means to you and how you relate to the idea of Communication.

(If it helps, just imagine I’ve asked you to write a short essay titled “What Communication means to me”, and back up your opinions with a bit of research) 

3. Create a Flash animated cartoon based on the theme of Communication as you interpret it.

4. The Flash cartoon can be anything you like, but it needs to be between 30-90 seconds long, to be original and engaging, and to include some sound (either music or sound effects). It can be funny or serious, but it should definitely be engaging.

Due by midnight, Friday November 3, 2006.

Since your next task will be to create a short Flash based cartoon (details coming soon), I thought you might like to have a look at a few samples…

• http://flash.artie.com/
• http://www.flashcartoons.org/original.php
• http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/
• http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.html

I particularly like the last one - the StrongBad emails… hilarious! 
If you find any other good samples, please leave a link in the comments section.

Thought some of you might be interested in this post from one of the Australian news services about Google’s acquisition of YouTube. What a fairytale story for these two guys!

Story is here.

We will be spending a couple of lessons learning the basics of Flash.  It is a pretty amazing program and the more you learn about it, the more you realise there is to learn…  it’s a bit of a bottomless pit with what it can actually do.

You might like to speed up the process by checking out some of these tutorials.

•  http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/
• http://www.learnflash.com/flashtutorials2.htm
• http://www.entheosweb.com/Flash/default.asp 
• http://www.learnthat.com/computers/learn-1774-free_flash_mx_2004_training_tutorial.htm 
• http://www.atomiclearning.com/flash_mx_2004pc 

And if find any more, or you do any interesting animations, please add them to your blog so the rest of us can have a look.

Michelle asked if I could post up some links to the software mentioned in class today, so here goes…

• Google Sketchup (free)
• Stop Motion Animator (free)
• Macromedia Flash (30 day trial)
• Blender (free)

I added Blender… It’s a very sophisticated 3D animation software that’s way beyond what we will be doing in class, but I thought I’d mention it anyway just in case you want to check it out.

That’s about all I can remember. Leave a comment below if I’ve forgotten something you want more info on.

Oh, and the Family Guy episodes?  I’m thinkin’ Limewire.

Our next task will be to look at the different forms of animation, and how animation can be used to communicate your ideas.

Our main task for this unit will be to use Macromedia Flash to create a 2D cartoon. Flash has lots of useful tools for creating animations, and can do a lot of the hard tweening work for you. Our next few lessons will be developing basic skills in Flash… it can be quite challenging! After that you will beworking on an animated cartoon of your own.

If you’d like to have a play with some stop-frame animation at home, grab yourself a copy of Anasazi Stop Motion Animator and see what you can do with it. You will need a camera of some sort (just a cheap webcam should do the trick, or you could try plugging your DV Camera into your computer). If you do end up making any short animations, please share them on your blog. (maybe upload to YouTube and then link to it)

For an overview of animation and different techniques, this site has some good basic information. It’s fairly basic, and admittedly it’s aimed at younger kids, but it’s still a useful place to get an overview of the basics of animation.

You can also get a free 30 day trial copy of Flash (for your home computer) at www.adobe.com/go/tryflash