Unit 27

A Flash animation or Flash cartoon is an animated film which is created using Adobe Flash or similar animation software. The reason animations are used used online is so your website is not static and generates attention to your site. Flash animation is 2D animation which is very simple to make and even though it's so simple it can look incredibly nice depending on how good you are at using flash animation software. Flash animation is often saved as a .swf file format. The term Flash animation not only refers to the file format but to a certain kind of movement and visual style which, in many circles is seen as simplistic or unpolished. Flash animation has been used before on television for cartoons on channels such as cartoon network and CBBC. It is also used on computers and on websites. An example of this is a website called www.wix.com. This website is one which allows you to build a mini site of your own. One thing which I have used wix for is my Facebook page. Here is the link https://www.facebook.com/JamesSneeDesign/. With it being all made in flash it's usually quite slow to load up. My website itself also uses flash animation. The title which is my name flashing from black to green and then the rollover of all the images below it. Flash is very easy to get used to. At first I thought it would be hard but it's really not as difficult as it looks. On my own website for the name flashing part at the top all I used was a background image which is the gray and then two different images I created in Inkscape, one which is black with a green background and the other which is green with a black background. I then added the images into flash and just worked from there. I made the time frame 70 and then placed my background image to go for the whole 70 then I added the two images and made the first one go for 35 then the other for 35 also and it just repeats itself. That's how simple using flash is although you can create more complex things this wasn't that difficult. If a client wants some work done on flash then you must make sure that it fits with the work you're already doing for them. Take my title change for example, I have kept the same colours as the website, I haven't done anything outrageous and made any dramatic changes. When doing work for a client you must make sure you do the same. When saving a flash design you must make sure that you save it as the right format. Like I said earlier it usually tends to be a .swf file. You must also make sure that you save the file that is relevant to the client whom you are doing it for, for example if you were doing a title for vet company save it as vettitle.swf.