Last night I finished up a little animated Ecard for Easter. It was a fun project and for the most part turned out not too bad for a first attempt. I wish I would have had more time to work on it, but since Easter is tomorrow I had to finish it up.
My main goal with this project was to do a little bit more complicated of an animation. If you notice, it is really just the old “bouncing ball” exercise, one of the first steps most books teach in learning to animate. I would have like to get more squash and stretch into the bouncing baby bunny, but again time didn’t permit it.
Another goal was to try and get this into flash, with audio. That was a big challenge. I had to redraw the characters several times before they looked right in .SWF format. Also audio export is not well covered in the AS manual. Just as I was about ready to give up on the audio portion of the card I found a post on the AS forum that mentioned that you can import .WAV files into the program to animate with, but in order to export .SWF you need to have a copy of the file in the fold as a .MP3 at either 44100kHz, 22050kHz, or 11025kHz sample rates. For some reason AS won’t import .MP3’s but that is the only format that it will export. Now there is some pretty strange logic. I did the sound mixing in Premiere and exported the audio only into AS.
Another very important thing to get your .SWF files looping correctly in the browser is that you need to have file/project setting/extra swf frames clicked on. I was having a devil of a time getting that to work. Of course you really do need Flash to do more editing but for now that is not an option for me. I would have like to add a “play” button, and also an option to turn off the soundtrack. Hopefully soon.
Click the graphic above to see the final animation, or click here. The file is not optimized so if you are not on a high speed connection I’m not sure how/if it will play.