Using images to create my animation drawing.

In this clip you can see that I have used a deferent amount of frames for each animated car, to achieve the illusion in the difference in speed at which they cross the screen.

I downloaded the images of the red car above from google images, and uploaded it into Flash. I then used the brush tool to draw over the image my own car. I then deleted the original image of the car, leaving my outline drawing underneath which I used for my animation.

I created the different speeds in the two cars by selecting that I want each car to move from one end of the screen to the other, then choosing how many frames I want this movement to take. In this case I chose the car in layer 7 to have twice as much frames as the car in layer "car", which in hand created twice as many frames. This meant that the car in layer "car" would complete the set distance in twice as little frames as the car in layer 7, therefore creating the illusion that it moves faster. 

I used the tool motion tween to make Flash auto-create the frames between the selected movement.

Creating this animation thought me 2 new techniques. One was that I can draw over another image to create a drawing, this allowed me to draw my car much faster and and much more accurately than if I hadn't used the image. The second technique was that By creating less frames for the movement of an object, I can make it move faster than it would with the normal speed.

My Fist Animation using Adobe Flash

This is an animation showing a stickman running across the beach, while 2 birds fly through the screen:

The screenshot above shows the 3 different layers I have created for each of the different actions in my animation. The first layer is the one of my stickman, it features a sequence of frames, which play one after another to create the illusion of my stickman running across the beach.

Each "dot" represents a new frame. However I figured that drawing each frame one by one would take too long, and so I decided to skip every other frame to save time.

I did this by pressing f5 after each frame. This means that now instead of one second of my clip consisting of 24 frames, it is halved to 12. This literally means that instead of 24 frames passing through the screen in 1 second, only 12 do. The result of this is that the image doesn't look as smooth as it would otherwise. I made this decision because since this is my first animation, it was more important to get the taste of using all the other tools in Flash, so that later on I can work on a higher-quality animation.

Another tool I used to create my animation, was a tool called "Onion Skin". This tool enabled me to see the previous frame I had drawn while working on my current one.

The image above shows the effect created by Onion Skin on my current frame. As we can see there are two drawings of a stickman, the faded one is the image from the previous frame and the one that is highlighted is the current image I am working on. This feature has proven to be very useful as it allows me to see what my last image was so that I can draw my current one progressing slightly differently to create the illusion of motion.

Lastly I am going to discuss the choice of layers I used in my animation. There are 3 present layers that make up this 10 second animation. As already discussed the first layer is responsible for the movement of my stickman. The second layer corresponds to the two birds that fly over the sea. I have animated them on the same basis as the stickman, which I talked about.

The last layer is the background. Take notice that there are no changes to the individual frames throughout the animation. Instead there same frame is repeated throughout the entire length of the clip. The reason for this is that the background doesn't need to change, in this case it simply adds context to the 2 subjects of this animation which are the stickman and the 2 birds.

Cutout Animation

This is my Cutout Animation I created using Adobe Flash:

In this project I took a picture of myself and cutout each individual body part using Adobe Photoshop, and then saved them inside a folder.

I then uploaded all the images into Adobe Flash and created an animation using these body parts. I created a layer for each picture, this would later allow me to be able to animate each body part individually from the other, and create the illusion of movement.

I set the point of movement for each picture to connect to the body instead of the middle, which was the default. This means that instead of each body part moving around it's centre, they move around the body.

I have created a motion tween between each black point on each of the layers. This means that I get to choose from where to where each picture moves. After I have selected the points Adobe Flash creates each individual frame to get my image from point A to point B.

This is very efficient, as I don't have to move (for example the hand) a little by little for each frame to get it from point A to point B, ultimately saving me time.

As it is shown in the screenshot above, each black dot represents the movement change from the previous dot. It is evident that not all dots are positioned at the same place, this means that each picture moves at a different rate than the other, making my animated character look more realistic.

In one of my layers I featured a background. Using the motion tween feature, I set a point of enlargement, which essentially allowed me to enlarge the background of a sky from the start to the end of the video. The effect this creates its that when the whole animation is being played it appears as if the character is falling from the sky. 

Lastly I used an mp3 file to add sound to my animation in a separate layer I called "music". I selected a song from the famous Musician Justin Bieber. This was relevant as I also changed the head of my character to Justin Bieber's face. The song is called " I can fly" and is also performed by Justin Bieber. This shows the consistence in my project as all the building blocks used to create this animation add to create a short 10 second video of Justin Bieber falling through the sky with his hands waving in the air, as his song "I can fly" ironically plays in the background.