Thursday, 10 April 2014

Sequencing Animations

I've begun building a continuous loop of my Flash animations in one single file. I'm placing each one on the timeline, with a single cell between them, and using the Flash code, [ActionScript 3.0] to control the movement of the playhead through the sequence.
Its complex & time consuming. I have to work out the exact length of the musical score for each animation, and in some cases I have to edit the music clip as well so that I don't have one animation that plays for too long.

The result though is one single file which plays each animation for twenty seconds or so, then has a two second break on a blank black screen, [or in some cases I 'tween a bright yellow oblong across the screen in this cell just to show off my Flash skills!], then moves on the next animation. Once I get every animation I create on a single loop, I can edit it by removing the fiirst cell and placing it at the end of the sequence, so that this one starts at a different place to the original, save it as sequence_2, then edit that one in the same way, so it starts at a new place, saving it as sequence_3, and so on, until I've got ten or so loops which all begin in a different place.

The advantage of this is that when it comes to the final show, I will only need ten computers to play the animations, rather than a computer for each single animation -which if I build fifty would be impossible.

Its a really complex procedure to get this right. I'm having to build a big chart which shows each loop in a line, then I can decide which score plays when, so that in the beginning the music from the animations are distinct, until one after the other each score begins to play, and the sound rises to a din, and then one by one each score is removed until the sound is clear again.....and then the process begins again, over and over.

Its a really complex task I have set myself, but I know that if I manage to sequence every animation so that the sound layers on top of each other until its a din, then fades away until the music is audible, and repeats this over and over, it will be very effective towards creating a sense of disharmony and shock to accompany my work.

No comments:

Post a Comment