Evaluating flash as an animation tool

Adobe Flash is used as an animation program because it offers a lot and makes life easier for people who animate or who create animations. The tools that it offers help the user get on with their work easier and without a problem. Here is a list of some of the animation features that it comes with and how they help develop the animation, on the other hand there are some disadvantages with using Flash such as compatibility issues etc.

Frames help gain full control over separate animation characteristics with object based animation, which applies tweens directly to the objects. Flash also uses tweens which are used to fill gaps in between two key frames. A key frame is something that will copy one frame and paste the exact same one into another, they also come as a start and end point for the moving in the animation. There are two types of tweens in which one of them is called motion tween and the other one is called shape tween.

A motion tween is the thing that fills in the gaps between two keyframes when you are animating a selected object, they can be used to make things like vehicles move but their weakness lies in the fact that you do not have control over the motion as well as you would if the animation was created with individual key frames. One advantage that they do have however is that they could be reused again just like symbols in order to reduce the file size.

Shape tween animation is used mainly in flash designs for example it could be used to make circles into squares, blue letters into yellow buttons etc. Any vector object can be changed by the shape tween animation in flash tool. This change can either be in shape or colour depending on the requirements of the flash design. It offers various choices which can be change, such as size, colour, location and so on. Flash designs are mainly used for things such as shapes, colours and appropriate positioning of the object.

However there are some disadvantages of using these motions because the user does not have full control over them, the computer may not do it correctly which can result in the animation not looking right when it is being previewed. However some shape tweens can cause problems as well for example if there is a shape and accidentally there is a dot or line drawn in, then it will tween that into being in the shape as well which could mess up the way the shape should look and the way it ought to be moving.

One Advantage flash has is that it has the ability to switch between scenes, this is an advantage because it gives the user more room to work with and still have all the functions working, for example one can be designing and on the other scene they could be creating the second part to the animation. This would save more frames for the selected scenes as there are a limited amount of frames.

Adobe Flash comes with a lot of creative tools and features which can help the user in creating animations etc. However there is a slight disadvantage in that which is that it can take along time to load if you have a computer which is slow this would be a problem because Flash comes with a lot of content and features and if you have a slow computer then it would take along time to load the software.

One of the common and most obvious disadvantages is that you must pay for the full Adobe suite even though you just want to use and work with one application. However other free flash editing programs do not offer the features that Adobe Flash does, there are a few versions of Flash such as CS3 and CS4. The file extensions that these versions use are Fla which stands for Flash and swf which stands for Shockwave Flash.

Flash can let the user adjust the positioning of the objects for example if there is a background on layer 1 and a drawing on layer 2 of a car, then the order of the layers will change the positioning of the way the animation was meant to be set out. If layer 1 is above layer 2 then the background will fill the entire page, however if layer 2 is above layer 1 then it will appear above the background and look as the way it should do. It also has an option to move objects from front to back which does not work well because it makes things worse.

Flash is very good for publishing animations etc on the Internet, however creating Web Pages, interactive games and videos in Flash CS3 can be a problem for people who are beginners on using the Software because to create these things you need to have a fair amount of knowledge which can make it easy to create and design things in Flash, without that it would be a struggle.

Flash uses actionscript code which is a series of commands that can instruct a flash object what to do, it can tell the animation to go to a certain keyframe or scene, control object movement with the arrow keys or anything your specify, most of the advanced features you want to add to a flash document are implemented through actionscript. It has three versions available, actionscript 1.0, 2.0 and the latest 3.0, each are slightly different in there context, 3.0 features some new 3D related code and uses much less text than action-script 2.0 however it can be slightly more complicated and annoying if your familiar with the previous version of the script.

When I used Flash I found the different ways of accessing features slightly confusing. However over the course of designing and creating my animation I learned about how to create Key Frames, Shape Tweens, and Motion Tweens. I also learnt how to work on different scenes and add sound to scenes. As I got to know how to do some of this it made me interested in learning about it more. However I found some of it hard for example I found the action-script hard because I didn’t understand where to put the text or which text performed which function. But apart from that I enjoyed working in Flash because it offered a lot of features.