It started off quite smoothly. I started off by just doing the beginning which was a rotoscope of a flag in the wind this was to be used in the start of the introduction where it gave you a shot of the kingdom. This worked well and didnt take that long to do so I was off to a good start. Then I decided to draw the entire body of the metal men. I knew it was going to take a couple of days because I was putting a lot of detail into it and the faces took a while to do anyway. I drew the metal men very big, about 3 times the size of the stage just so I could get a lot of detail in. This is where the troubles started, I had drawn the characters too big with too much detail and even when I tried to resize them they still had so much detail in them and the computer couldn't cope. Even though the computer kept crashing after doing 15mins work I decided to be stubborn and carry on with the work and finish the other metal men.
Half way into the second week and I was still trying to animate these metal men and decided it was just taking too long and I would have to try and find another way around it. I didnt have enough time to re-draw the metal men and I really couldn't be bothered either so I decided that would be my last option. I tried putting the images as symbols but this worked for a little bit but as soon as I started animating it more it slowed right down again.
I decided to give up with the metal men scene for now and decided to start working on the other scenes.
The drawings for the other scenes had already been done because those images were going to be use in the game so all I had to do was import the images into flash and animate them. After animating them I realized that the file sizes were still quite big and didnt think that my computer would be able to cope if I put all the scenes together.
The Monday after the easter break I had a brain wave I thought if I could put the images of the metal men into photoshop some how I could just import them into flash and then they would be a lot easier to deal with but how could I do that, I tried to just copy and paste the image into photoshop but this made it really small and distorted. Then I had a plan I thought if I could print screen the image off of flash then I could put it into photoshop, although then my computer would have to last a couple of minutes in flash without crashing.
SUCCESS
It worked my computer didnt crash and manage to get all the metal men into flash without it being distorted, I did the body in sections so I could get a lot of detail in. Now I have all the images now all I have to do is animate them. I decided to re-do all the animations I had already done because the files were too big for what they were.
Now I have a 1 and a half days to animate the whole animation so I can show it too my group on the monday.
AHHHHHHH
Lots of key frames made the animation files really big so I decided to motion tween EVERYTHING. (apart from the flag I was leaving that as a rotoscope)
Motion Tween took a lot less time too than animating every frame, why didn't I think of doing that before it would have saved me sooooo much time. I managed to get a 1/4 of the animation done by monday night but I still had a lot more to do.
Tuesday I just sat at my desk working on my animation it took a lot of time but by 1:30am I ahd manage to get the majority of it finished and it was good enough to show my group that following morning
WOOOHOOOOO
The group liked it and now all there is to do on it is the fade outs from scene to scene, the backgrounds and the words which were all finished by the wednesday evening. I had a little troupble deciding what colour to do the writing on the animation and originally I had it red but I thought I looked to harsh and I didnt want it to stand out that much. After a while I decided that the white with the black shadowing looked the best and I went with that option. I also made sure that the text would be up there for a while so children would be able to read it and also see what was happening in the animation in that scene.
The animation was then complete.
Animation for the Introduction
Posted by Emily Cox
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