Week 1 Blog

My introduction to Flash was a bit overwhelming at first, coming in with no knowledge of the program at all, but I am extremely interested in its capabilities. The drawing tools seem a bit simpler and more straightforward than that of Illustrator, but since I have gotten used to Illustrator and have gotten comfortable using it, the transition will probably be real annoying and frustrating at first. There's a lot you can do in Flash that you can't do in Illustrator though, so I'm hoping to obtain a real good knowledge of all the tools, and start becoming real comfortable and have fun with the program. Although the class is intended for motion graphics, which I actually find really cool, I'd love to learn how to animate cartoon characters like how you'd see on a television show. The video we watched on Disney's Multi-Plane camera gave me a good idea of how this process used to go on before the digital age. Every character, scene, and piece of setting was hand drawn and snapshots were used to portray every movement. The character, such as Mickey Mouse in the video, is inked and painted on to a transparent sheet of celluloid, and then is placed on top of the drawn scene. To give the illusion of walking, the scene is moved behind him more and more for each progressing snapshot. Different images of Mickey's body posture are used to create the illusion of a walk cycle and then the scene comes alive. The Multi-Plane camera dealt with the problems they couldn't be controlled by just a simple drawn background. Such things like zooming in while still keeping the proportions of every object in the scene was the advantage of the new technology. For example, the problem in a night scene was when the viewer zoomed in and got deeper into the picture, the moon would increase drastically in size. However, we know that when we move toward the moon it doesn't get bigger, so this was a large visual perspective problem. To solve this, the Multi-Plane camera acted like different layers on Flash. The picture is broken up and certain parts of the scene were drawn on different transparent papers. The papers were then stacked vertically, spread apart, with the camera pointed down from above. This now solved the problem and to zoom all that needed to happen was for the pictures to move closer together to give the proper illusion of zooming into the scene. Visual perspective is clearly an extremely important thing to take into consideration. The second video we watched, "The Old Mill," included no dialogue at all, but showed me how emotions and interest can be evoked simply by illustration and sound.