The Final Post

Well as we come to the end of the course, I am looking back with some fondness to the past months of learning Flash and can honestly say that should I be called upon to make a flash animation for a website, I will be able to pick up where I left off and with a few refreshers from Atomic Learning should not have too much problem making a banner or animated button.

Some things I learned along the way that I would like to pass on to the casual reader who has stumbled upon my blog.

1. Understanding the drawing tools and how they can be used to make any kind of object that you need for your animations is very important. Objects really enable the optimization for small file size in flash that is important in making web animations that load quickly.
2. The stage and the timeline and adding of key frames and how tweening works is at the heart of animation of objects in Flash. You need to be able to move around on the stage and use the different selection tools efficiently. (This was the cause for many a return visit to Atomic Learning for me in the latter half of the course.
3. You may need more than one resource to learn Flash fully. I used Atomic Learning and the Flash in A Flash tutorials to great effect during the past few months.
4. The export settings are really quite tricky to understand but once you do, there is great flexibility. Animated Gif files are easily created and sometimes work better on a website that a .swf file.
5. Finally dont be afraid to go back and relearn some key concepts if they are holding you back. Even the most experienced users sometimes find that a trip back to the basics is in order.
6. Have fun, animation is time consuming but can be very rewarding.

As far as the course goes, I have completed what I set out to do in the beginning, to learn flash for kicks. My plan did not go the way I thought it would and this final two weeks I found there were a few things I had not fully grasped that required me to watch some Atomic Learning clips again. I am not very good at dreaming up off the cuff projects that need an animation so I found myself with no go example to go with for this two weeks. I hope my animated banner will speak for my improvement in skills and meet the requirements set forth for the course.
I had already finished the banner last week and put it on my website. Thanks to Dr Banister for encouraging me to keep going with Flash, it was fun after I got over the frustrations of it not being as much like Photoshop as I had been hoping.
I now have another tool in my arsenal that I can use to help develop engaging media for my students.

Overall I think the concept of picking a new application to learn in place of learning the basic skills covered in the early part of the checklist has served me well. There are a lot of software programs out there that we never get the chance to try unless we find a particular purpose for doing so. This requirement for the course has given me the motivation to learn Flash although I am not so sure that Flash will in another few years slide into the intergalactic bit bucket of time as another cool technology that was replaced by something better… time will tell.


Thanks for reading and good luck in your journey in learning Flash.