Best PracticesPlanning Your Content And Animation


One of the most powerful ways to be efficient when creating animations and layout schemes for your Flash projects is to storyboard. Although it takes some time to actually sit down and do your planning, it saves enormous amounts of time later because you can simply go in and produce or experiment in certain directions based on those plans.

An animation storyboard does not need to be complex. Sit down and on a pad of paper write out in simple sentences what you would like to have happen.

  1. The sun rises over the hill.

  2. The barn door opens.

  3. The pig walks out.

Now draw three rectangles and give some visual indication of where you would like everything to be placed on the stage. This can be as simple as circles and squares if you can't draw very well. Then write the line beside it and show how you want things to move or a particular point where things change. One might show the sun low with an arrow indicating where it should come up. In another the barn door opens. In a third the pig is halfway out the door, with an arrow indicating where he will walk.

Now you can hand that off to someone else to produce, or produce it yourself. If you are creating it yourself, you can begin to write what animation types you need to accomplish those tasks and what symbols you need. For example, you would know that you could use a motion tween for the sun, so the sun needs to be a symbol on its own layer. The barn door should be its own symbol, and you would likely need to create a keyframe animation to give it the feel of a door opening. This might mean that you need three or four door symbols at different stages.

At this point, you're ready to start collecting and creating your visual assets, and composing the movie and its layers.



Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio 8
ISBN: 0789733854
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 337

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