Some photos for you from the stop motion process from a few weeks ago.

There is me using the Dragon stop motion software

Shooting in process

My wife helping out

weekend

started fixing up a code for a better drag/drop application. 


I thought I might use xml to bring in different images for this but then I realized that would probably make my life a lot more difficult.  There is a chance I will still do that down the line, but for now I am going to try to find the easiest way to make it do what I want it to do. 


So I messed around with that for a few hours and hopefully made some progress.  It is kind of difficult to figure out the best way of doing things.  Something seems very simple until you break it down and try to figure out how it will actually work. 
I need to refresh myself on using 'export to actionscript'

Elephant stop motion and Map navigation

Shot the stop motion for the elephant last night and put it together in premiere pro today.

There are still some things that need to be sorted out with it.  I am a little concerned with the quality of video that I am getting by the time I bring this into flash.  The quality is a bit lacking.  I can go back if I have time at the end of it and fix any problems easily enough.  I have everything saved with the stop motion sequences.  But probably best to figure these things out earlier.  I am trying some different export settings to see if that helps.

I also finally figured out how to link to different .swf movies with in my map using XML and an actionscript class.  The solution turned out to be fairly simple and I think it works better than what I was going to do before.

elephant

Hav'nt gotten quite as much as i would like to have gotten done this weekend so far.  Some decent progress though.  I have my animal gallery's almost sorted out.  There is always one problem though, I can't get my path correct with something so the photos won't show up when you go through the web page.

if I was to go back to the start of this project, i would downplay the importance of actionscript type things.  Not that i am really even using that much, but what I am using tends to be a struggle every single step of the way.  I am just really not all that good at it.  At the beginning of the year I assumed I would eventually start to 'get it' like with HTML or CSS, but despite extra studying and all that...  aww well.  I'll just have to keep struggling on and do what I can.

In more fun news, I finished making my elephant today.  Stop motion shooting scheduled for tomorrow night. 

Work continues

After taking the good part of a week off to work on other class projects I am back into Major Project work.

I have put together a good part of the "welcome" and "den" movies, incorporating my stop motion video into the flash timeline with some basic actionscript linking things together.
I also scanned in some new textures so I can make some images that appear to be made out of paper in photoshop for buttons and the like.
I should have, for the most part those two movies done in the next couple of days.  There is more that could be done, but I will save that for the 'make everything look pretty and right' phase, which follows the get everything together phase and the "oh balls, how do I make actionscript actually do what I want" panic phase#2.

I plan on restarting the former phase this weekend.

welcome sequence finished (mostly)!

Here is the mostly complete welcome stop motion sequence.  A lot of work there for just a few seconds.  Of course I will be stopping the movie part of they way through so the user has a chance to read the speech bubble I will be putting in.  So a little flash functionality and I'll be moving on the the next step.