dissection of the grind

Lordy, how I hate symbolizing stuff in Flash.

The current bit I'm working on started with inking some stuff in Toon Boom. Looks nice, came out much prettier than it would've if I'd inked in Flash. TB lets you turn the canvas around like you were using a real animation disc, so you can pull a nice line out very easily. (Painter and OpenCanvas do this too. I think Expression did as well but it's been a while.)

But then I take the elements I made in Toon Boom, and I export them as a SWF, and I bring those into Flash and I start the dreary, boring work of turning everything in the scene into symbols. It's boring and unautomatable. When I'm low on estrogen as I am right now, it's frustratingly hard to shrug and just plow through it. And I need to deliver this thing as a Flash source file, so I really don't have any other option but to use the damn program.

Every time I've had to symbolize stuff myself, it took for. fucking. ever. Or felt like it. The actual animation takes next to no time next to this phase, for me. Despite it's awkwardness, drawing in Flash may well be the best choice, because I can symbolize each drawing (or part of a drawing) as it's finished, instead of having to bring it in, possibly cut it apart, and put it back together again - I'm working on the timing and the drawing and the coloring and everything all at once, and the boring, technical job of symbolizing happens invisibly. This is how I did the animated appearance of Dr. Procyon for the COG. Inking in Flash was painful, but symbolizing was painless.

I'd have finished this piece yesterday if not for the fact that I've been slowly, slowly symbolizing it in fits and starts all night long. More fits than starts.

Once I get it all symbolized it probably won't be more than an hour or so of work to time it. *sigh*

catching up

I finally managed to convince Flash to output this properly. It's my cameo appearance in the COG's 10th anniversary show.

Flash 6, makes noise. Check it out. This is a link to a raw swf, so it may be pretty damn big - if it's slow, shrink your browser window and/or right-click on it and set the quality to 'low'.

This isn't exactly what appeared on-screen - Lewis added some blur to the bg in Premiere, and of course the voices would have been the actual band members interacting with the video - but it's close enough. Far from my best animation, but it was done from scratch in one week, with an episode of data loss because the Flash editor is crap!

simple flash preloader extreeeeeem

One-frame scene at the beginning of your movie. Loads the whole damn thing and manifests a 'play' button; comes back to this when the movie loops unless you put a 'play again?' button at the end. I'm sick of having to rebuild this from first principles, or go hunting for this kind of crap when I can barely remember Actionscript syntax, you see.

Flash 6 or above. Simple graphics are best. Pick colors and shapes to harmonize with the cartoon, of course.

And while I'm making Flash-related reference notes for myself: DON'T TRUST IT TO SAVE. 'Save and compact' can and will die mid-save. SAVE AS A NEW VERSION LIKE YOU DID BACK ON WPH because FLASH IS STILL GLITCHY. I go use other programs that don't regularly shit their own bed and I forget this and I lose work and I am full of hate and sadness.

This loader can be as pretty as I want it to be, or it can just be quick and dirty like the one I just did.

stage:

stop();
loader.stop();

on "loader" clip (it HAS to have a name!):

onClipEvent (enterFrame)
{
	gotoAndStop (Math.floor((_root.getBytesLoaded()/_root.getBytesTotal())*this._totalframes));
}

(bugfix, october: movieclips don't comprehend non-integer frame numbers; I have to clamp it manually.)

in the loader clip:
* any (simple) animation, where frame 1 is 0%, and frame n is 100%.
* frame n contains the play button:

on (release) {
	_root.play();
}

and don't forget the credit/copyright button(s) in the loader page:

on (release) { getURL("http://egypt.urnash.com");}