Flash file evaluation.

I created an interactive animation using Flash CS5 / 5.5 using tweens, buttons and digitally drawn images using Photoshop. The story was about a hero who discovers an enemy has destroyed her city; she destroys him in revenge.

Learning outcome 1:

I think if I had more time to do my work then I would have given more effort during the end of my animation by adding sound and maybe more scenes. I feel that I have worked too much on the first few scenes without thinking what to do on my last few scenes. I think from the beginning I should have made all of the digital images before I started making the animation on Flash this way I would have split my time and planned to do my work better.

Learning outcome 2:

I chose this story line because I felt that it was un-usual. The mind map that I used to make my decision on the animation was the same mind-map that I used to make my decision in my Materials, Techniques and Processes class. As Flash was one of the methods that where mentioned and the only one that we were using in the Digital Story Telling this was the obvious method of animation. Like my stop motion animation I decided to make all of my images digitally and not with photographs. I felt that the nature of my story wasn’t really realistic and didn’t feel the need to try and make it seem real as it was an animation. The original images that I used were drawn by hand and then scanned to the PC so that I could use the paint brush tools on Photoshop to draw over the scanned images I think now after that I have made my animation, I wish that I had actually use photography as my method so that I didn’t have to spend so long on my animation. I like my final result of my animation and have included lots of interactivity into it but I do feel that the end of my animation could use some more sounds to liven it up a little.

Learning outcome 3:

My first idea originally involved a female hero trying to save her city and failing to do so also damaging her own city in the process; I scrapped this idea but have mentioned it in my blog, because I thought that there is no real story involved in it. I always feel that story endings have to be somewhat happy or winning, not so much happy because that is always so cliché.

I think that in my blog I have shown very clearly that I have developed my ideas and my designs pretty well as it involves my first sketches and the different designs that I have produced until I got one that made sense.

I did my story with just single images instead of literal stop motions or all tweened scenes because I like the simplicity in the story, this was what I was trying to aim for.