Hello! I hope everyone had a good Christmas and is looking forward to the new year.
I believe the first entry in this “Stupid Flash Tricks” series was over a dozen years ago (I’m not going to look it up). Since that time, Adobe’s Flash animation package has gone from ubiquitous hero of the internet to abandoned pariah, with some browsers (Google Chrome) saying they will no longer support it.
Naturally, this is the time I choose to decide I need to attempt to learn it again. Much like PhotoShop, once you gain a slight understanding of how Flash works, you can appreciate the difficult curve you just rounded. Unlike PhotoShop, though, Flash remains obstinate in its refusal to cooperate. An errant mouse-click can undo all manner of carefully arranged work. Things seem designed specifically to be time-consuming and confusing, precision is an absolute must, and in two key areas of film–sound and editing–it remains bafflingly primitive and difficult.
Sound–better have the sound just the way you like it before you import it into a project, because there’s no way to edit that sound in Flash itself. Yes, you can’t even change the volume if it’s too loud.*
Editing–movies are made by shooting one scene, then another, and so on until you have the footage you want. You then edit these scenes together to tell the story. Within Flash, the only way to combine two different scenes (i.e., two separate animated scenes) is to sweep your mouse across all the frames in your second scene, copy them, open the first scene, and paste them into the frames after the first scene ends.*
Anyway, despite that, here‘s my latest Flash project, that I’ve been working on for ages.
It’s called “Look at me,” from the only line of dialogue in the whole thing. Enjoy! And as always, thanks for visiting. Happy New Year!
*As indicated, I’m still strictly a novice in Flash, so there may be ways to do these things within Flash itself. However, I did search for those ways diligently, and found nothing. Third-party solutions are no way to go through life, son, but they do allow one to work.
A Planet That Has No Sky 