Flash assignment artist's statement

Artist's Statement

Matt Hornick

I really enjoy the hybridity of music and imagery. For this Flash animation project, I attempted make my own piece that combines these two mediums.

It was one of my first times using flash, so I encountered a lot of difficulties during production. One of the my tricky things was making the buttons. Even though I only had two, the programming aspect frustrated me. I would think I followed the tutorials correctly, but they just would not do what I wanted. For instance, I would be able to click the play button but it wouldn't play the movie. I had to fool around with that for a while to get it right. Also, the button at the end to go back to start of the movie was difficult to configure.

Along with the button difficulty, I struggled to prevent the music from playing before pressing the play button. This was because the music started on the first frame. I realized that if I put the music after the play button, the song would start after pressing play. One thing I could not solve was how to have the music stop when the movie stops. At the end of the movie, everything is frozen but the music is still playing. Then when you press the go back to start button the music overlaps with the original track, which is rather annoying.

The tweening aspect of the movie I found relatively easy. The most difficult thing to do was probably the growing line in the beginning. I had to make a 'mask' to get the effect – this took a little time to figure out how to do correctly.

Overall, I really like simple animations with only a few colours, and I think I was successful in that aspect. I did not realize I was supposed to have type in my animation, and I probably would have made an entirely different movie had I known this. I had fun and learned a lot while making it, and in future productions I will try and make them a bit more interesting and interactive.

What I learned

From doing my flash assignment I learned a number of things - most of which I indicate in my artists statement. I learned how to put music into flash, how to do motion tweens, how make masks, how to make simple buttons and how to use key frames correctly. I basically learned everything about flash in this class, as I wasn't too familiar with it before this class.