MSEC Multimedia Elective, Fall 2002, Homework 3: Animation via Macromedia Flash

Due November 25, 2002 (10 point bonus if you email that assignment is ready by Nov. 25 8 a.m. (see email))

Required Software

You will be using Macromedia Flash to author your animation. If you wish to use another animation authoring product, contact Mike Christel for permission before you start.

You can download the Flash MX trial version for your computer by following the instructions at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/trial/. You can also purchase an Education Version of Flash in the CMU Computer Store for ~$100. Versions 4 and 5 of Flash will work as well if you already own a prior version. Only brief instruction and an overview will be provided in class. Additional lessons are provided within the trial version of Flash itself (under the "Help" menu). You should definitely go through these lessons to understand the Flash architecture, terminology, and basic feature set. Also, the Webmonkey tutorials on using Flash for web-based animations were found useful by prior e-Commerce Multimedia classes. Flash was chosen based on its easy availability, widespread use, rich environment and tools, and web-based learning infrastructure, so if you want to learn more, query with your favorite search engine on "Flash tutorial" or "Flash example" and you will get lots of other resources to help you with this assignment.

Once you have been introduced to the product, you may need detailed help in an area. You can get technical notes and indexed help from Macromedia directly. The following links work as of October 24, 2002, but should they fail in the future just navigate within the Macromedia web site to the support area for Flash:
Support area for Macromedia Flash
Recent info. and technical notes regarding Flash

Assignment Requirements

In your final production, you must have:

at least three animations
three different types of animation effects such as shape tweening, rotation tweening, motion tweening, alpha channel tweening, or tweening along a specified path (other effects possible; only a few possibilities listed here to keep your creative options open)
some interaction, so at least one play point and one stop point
at least one example of a button with different states (the Flash tutorial and lessons will clarify these terms and their implementation)
sound: streaming sounds or action/event sounds or both
a "Credits" button, in addition to the required button with different states, that links to a web page where you list credits for any audio, video, or images that you incorporated but which were not authored by you (if everything is authored by you then make this a "Permissions" button and give yourself the credit along with a listing of what copyright or reuse permissions you want to express)

To get approval for use of material produced by others, you can contact the author (or webmaster if the author is not specified) by email. I used the following text and succeeded in getting responses from 5 of 6 people:

Subject: permission to use a song of yours in Multimedia college course

I teach a multimedia course at Carnegie Mellon University, and would like to use your song "xxx" as an accompaniment to an animation for presentation to the class (for teaching about animations and simultaneous display of graphics, music, etc.) I can download this song from mp3.com if you agree to letting me use it for the class.

If you give me permission to use your song, I will acknowledge your contribution by displaying "xxx" along with whatever URL you wish, such as "http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/xxx.html", in that class presentation.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to get your permission to use your song in the Multimedia class.

Sincerely,

Mike Christel

You should use colors, fonts, audio and imagery appropriate to your message and purpose. Other interface features worthy of attention are spelling/text accuracy, synchronization and adequate timing, intuitive rewind/replay/stop/skip interactive functionality as appropriate, and good surrounding html (like an appropriate title) for the html text that incorporates your Flash animation (you can edit the html that is produced by the "Publish" command from within Flash). You may want to incorporate your images from the earlier homework, either as part of the animation or as end points. You can see an example of a Flash movie that meets the minimum criteria (but has other problems which may be briefly discussed in the animation class). An improved (but never perfect) example of the same movie may also be presented in the animation class.

As mentioned in class, you can examine some Flash examples (.fla files for Macromedia Flash 5.0) via an in-class only link.

Your Flash interactive animations will be checked from their web locations beginning on Tuesday, Nov. 26 (assignment due Monday, Nov. 25 at 11:59 p.m.). NOTE: if you email christel@cs.cmu.edu before 8 a.m. Monday Nov. 25 that your Flash assignment is ready, then it can be graded on Monday and you will receive a 5% bonus (10 points). (You copy over the .html and .swf files created by "Publish" from the File menu of options within Flash to your web site, NOT the .fla source file; also make sure to copy over to your web site any external html pages that are referenced from your Flash movie, such as a credits.html page if you have one. Test your page from its web site to make sure it works as expected and remember those html titles!) You will be graded on these requirements, with the assignment worth 200 points (twice that of other homework assignments).

Enjoy your creative freedom with this animation tool for web publishing. For all you budding artists and animation superstars, this is the assignment that gives you a chance to show off your skills.