I had trouble making the characters in flash freely so I copied over the outlines of the characters onto the new flash file, finding that they gave me the start to making my animation.
The tools I found most useful in this part were the pen tool and the shape tool because I could create the cartoon comic style for the characters. For the ITMA Man, because he was heavily muscular, I could use at least three circle shapes, bash them into a shape of an arm or a leg, then using the erase tool, take out the lines in each shape, making the whole shape. Below are some screenshots of how it was made.
Now I could erase lines without any problems. The next screenshot shows what happens when I clicked and held on the erase tool on the lines.
A white brush paint appears over where I clicked, held and scrubbed over. When I clicked off, the only thing to be erased was the lines.
I had found this the most useful tool to use as I created shapes, bashed them together and erased the lines to make one shape.
Auto Tweening
If I was doing my animation free handed (meaning not using any graphics to make auto tweens), I would control the easing myself. For this though, auto tweening an animation felt most helpful. Auto tweening means that when two keyframes are placed down on a timeline (the start and the end of that motion), I can then second click over the space between the two key frames and click "Create Classic Tween). Below is an example of the classic tween.
Also in tweening animations, I could then go into properties and change the easing either lowering or adding the value from -100 (easing in) to 100 (easing out). I felt that easing out was more appropriate for this movement when he flexes his muscles.
This type of tweening was used previously in making a motion graphics piece, making skeletons arms move in arcs. As I knew of its usefulness, I continued making more of the tweens using this method.
Free hand animation
In the story for my animation, the ITMA Man went to the top of the peak of success, but on his way he had to climb a mountain. I wanted to create a wind effect. This was incorporated from the wind seen in the game, "The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker." The gif below shows what I made.
The method of doing this was making a white line with the brush tool, but as I made the line appear, I made a new keyframe by pressing F6 on the keyboard (shortcut for Create new Keyframe) and painted until I had a swirl effect as seen above. Once I was happy, I normal erased the line as it gradually disappears creating the swirl effect. Once I was happy, I then cut the layer that the swirl was made in, pasted it into a graphic and copied that graphic and pasted multiple times in another graphic, placing them in different areas and in different times.
Using alpha colour effects
Making graphics in Flash helped me to then add special effects on, like making them appear and disappear in a dissolve action. This is called alpha. It can be set from 100% (showing the graphic) to 0% (making it completely disappear). Sometimes the graphics that have alphas on them could be used as a transparent object (like the visor for the ITMA Girl below).
Using Motion Tweens
Recently, I had learnt about using Motion tweens in Flash. This is making a path with the line tool, creating a motion path from this layer and then, with a graphic, paste it into the same layer as the guide, and add a key frame of where the line ends. Below is what the motion tween looks like.
When a line (or a pen path) is created and turned into a guide, it goes the colour of the outline corresponding to the layer (in this layer, the line is coloured green). I could still manipulate the tweens of this too.
Creating a vapor trail
Because the ITMA Girl has the power of flying, I wanted to create a vapor trail that she leaves behind, like an airplane would leave. I also wanted to make this as a motion of her flying too. I had found a way to make a graphic and animate a cartoony vapor trail. Below is what it looks like in the animation.
This is placed behind the ITMA Girl's graphic in this scene.To show its motion, I had made one keyframe with it being very large, then keyframed the end of it and made it tiny; so that it makes it look as though it disappears in the background.
Dust impact
In my scene, I made the ITMA Girl land down on the floor, and created an impact. One scene I wanted to focus on was how I made the dust swipe. A gif of the brief sequences is shown below.
I had first designed my team in this scene, then intended to make a dust cloud swipe by from the left to the right and cover the team in dust. How I made the dust was I painted a grey cloud in a graphic, then copied that same graphic and pasted it over another in a different layer, changing the scale and turning the opacity down. I then made the graphic swipe from left to right by keyframing the first frame from the left and the last to the right. I also wanted to make an easing in and out action, so I placed a keyframe in between the two and made the first section ease in and the last ease out, giving anticipation. There is a frame in which the team gets covered in the dust too. Because it blends in with the dust cloud, I didn't need to make an animation of the dust laying on the team.
Rendering animation and placing in Premiere with additional soundtrack
Originally in the files, I had speech and some background sounds to help me animate. Once I had finished animating everything for my FMP, I then exported the files as .MOVs in H264 codecs that was then imported into Adobe Premiere. There I could put the two scenes together and place soundtrack and sound effects together.
It had blended nicely in the timeline between the two files. In between, there was a jet woosh sound effect I had found on Soundtrack Pro and wanted to place it in between the two scenes as the ITMA Girl flew in on the last scene of the first file. This helped blend the two scenes together more.
Once everything was complied together, rendered and exported, I then got evaluations from a group of people, both animators and non-animators.
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