Due Wednesday, March 20 at 5:30 PM
Background: In this assignment you'll explore the potential of Flash for presenting multiple content threads that are subject both to random variation and user intervention. In other words, you'll get a taste of dynamic or emergent form.
Assignment: Complete the following tasks:
- Using text and graphics, create a Flash movie that makes a statement,
tells a story, or otherwise engages the viewer's sustained attention for
at least 30 seconds.
- Building upon the initial framework, create at least three alternatives
or expansions, each running at least 5 seconds. These additions could be extra scenes into which the main movie may branch more or less seamlessly.
Or if you choose to stay with a single timeline, you might place
your variations in subsidiary movie clips that are
invisible when the main movie begins, but which become visible
at some point.
- Enable automatic recombinations by placing at some point in the main
movie a script that does one of the following:
- Randomly branches into one of the additional scenes; or
- Randomly turns one of the subsidiary movie clips visible.
- Randomly branches into one of the additional scenes; or
- Enable viewer engagement by linking one of the transformations described above to a button action such as mouse click or rollover.
Technical Specifications:
- You may use any window size and aspect ratio that seems appropriate,
including full-screen mode. The reference platform for this project
is a 400MHz Pentium II PC with broadband Internet connection--in other
words, the Windows machines in the Graphics Lab.
- The Shockwave (object) file should not exceed 2 megabytes.
Please limit yourself to a single movie for this assignment.
(You'll have the chance to use multiple movies in the last two assignments.)
- Your project must include at least one sound, either in the main
movie or in one or more of the variations.
- Place three files in the Assignment3 directory within your
personal folder on Crow:
- yourLastName.fla
- The Flash source file
- yourLastName.swf
- The Shockwave object (export) file
- Assignment3.htm
- The HTML page generated when you publish your movie.
- Generate a static JPEG image to represent your movie.
Store this graphic in the Assignment3 directory.
If your window size is large, either reduce this image or crop out a detail.
The final graphic may exceed the 300x100 slot currently available on your
index page, but keep things in some sort of proportion.
On your index page,
replace the dummy banner graphic for Assignment 3 with your JPEG.
Edit the associated link so that
it points to Assignment3.htm within your Assignment3 directory.
- Write a brief note about your project in the space provided for it on your index page. Though your interaction mechanisms (buttons) should be easy to find, identify and locate them just in case.
You have a month to complete this assignment, but do NOT put off all the work until the last week. Begin planning and experimenting right away. Make thumbnail sketches and storyboards. Inventory possible picture and audio sources. Set up some test projects so that you are sure you can build the necessary timeline structures.
Meanwhile I'll provide more information about technical elements like sound, subsidiary movie clips, and random selection.
