Final Project - Maurice Frank

Click image to view movie.

This is a scene of a rabbit hopping through town and over three objects. I borrowed the rabbit from an earlier project. It was originally made from different shapes and objects grouped together. I converted it to a symbol and nested a movie clip, giving the rabbit its hop and exaggerated accordion movements with a motion tween. I used the motion editor to adjust some of the squeezing and stretching (Y scale) and added slow easing as well. I also used the motion editor to lengthen the time at the top of the hop. I also added an audio clip of a "boing" on each hop. When the movie starts, the rabbit hops from off stage to the middle of the scene before the background scroll begins courtesy of a classic tween.

Buildings go by in the background as the rabbit hops. The building background is from another project. I copied and pasted it into this scene, converted it to a symbol, and applied a classic tween to scroll it similar to the heart pulse. I duplicated the new symbol twice, altering the buildings a little each time. I then copied and pasted the scrolling background frames twice, and swapped the background instances with the altered building symbols.

Next I made the three objects for the rabbit to jump over. The first is a rotating three point star, the third new symbol. Its horizontal motion is controlled by a classic tween while the rotation is a nested movie clip with a motion tween. I again copied and pasted the frames, this time once, immediately following the original frames and then made another symbol which I swapped with the star. This new symbol is a face with a changing expression. The head is a stroke and the eyes, nose, and mouth are fills. A classic tween also controls the right-to-left movement. This time, however, the nested movie clip is multi-leveled with a motion tween controlling the shifting eyes, another motion tween for the "rolling" head, and three shape tweens for the eyes and mouth. The third object is a worm created with a drawing object with black fill so only the outline is visible. The worm is my IK shape with various poses animating it.

I made two new button (symbols) to start and stop the animation. Actually, I made one new button and duplicated it after converting it into a symbol. It is multi-layered with fill, shape, and text layers. Some aspect of each changes in every state. At the end, the rabbit hops off stage and a text link pops up. It links to a youtube video of some extremely funky violin playing. Seriously.

Everything went pretty well. No major problems. Copying and pasting frames (and anything else) is a great help as is being able to swap symbols. I did have some frustration with swapping symbols. I gave up for the night and the next time I opened Flash everything worked. I never think of restarting Flash when something that should work isn't. It's hard to tell if it's me or the software (usually me).