Web page

The web page surrounding the flash movies was never meant to be anything to impressive, mostly just a holder.

I started working on that simple web page again today.  A while back I thought it would be nice if people could make comments at each animal page, but I had not done much about it.  So today I gave it a try.  I started by putting my flash page online, which was easier than I expected.  The page also ran better than I expected it to online.
I tried putting the flash movies into joomla page because it would be an easy way to allow users to make comments, but they ran very poorly so I scrapped that idea.

I searched online and found this comment box page that lets you make a nice comment box in your html page and you manage it with your gmail account.  So with a little bit of work I managed to run a test in which I load these comment boxes in my single web page using an iFrame that is activated by the flash movies.  This way each animal should have its own comment page set right under it.  I tried a couple of these online and it seems like it works perfectly.  So i need to do some styling and then throw it in with the rest of the pages.  It looks very promising.

Adding content

The builder is now pretty much finished.

Today I am adding in the text and content for chatting with the animals.  Simple stuff, nothing very complicated.  
I also realized the other day that I am getting less useless with programming code.  I am still not very good, but I have gotten to the point where I can make some simple stuff work and it doesn't take days to do it.

Today: Almost a disaster.

So I was working away and things were actually going pretty well.  I solved a couple of problems and figured out how the builder could work with a single swf.

Then my computer started to get sluggish, so I closed everything and started to back up to my external hard drive.  I came down an hour later and the computer was pretty much frozen up.  After that I could only get the operating system to start up on safe mode.  I ran a test and it looked like my hard drive was half busted. But through some trials and stuff I seem to have it working to where it was earlier.  I still don't trust it though.. I am a little nervous working on this computer now.

But the builder is starting to come together, my computer did not explode, and I did not lose any work.  So i lost a few hours, but all in all it was a successful day.

here is a screen cap of the builder for you.
You can pick two animals to put on the screen.  Change the size or flip them.  You can also chose different backgrounds.  You can even write a message and print the whole thing!

Builder

I finished all of the stop motion just before the weekend.  Got almost nothing done on Easter (darn family you know).
Since then I have been working on improving the "builder" where users can make a scene and print it out.  Yesterday I was able to make it pull in backgrounds from XML so you can flip through different background options (*note to self~go back and fix the xmllist length issue).

I also had a fair amount of trouble controlling the animals.  I made it so you can scale up, scale down, and flip the animals for your scene.  I found there was a a conflict the way I had written it that would skew the animal if you flipped it before scaling.  After trying numerous solutions I finally figured out that I could scale the objects using height and width with multiplication rather than the scaleX and scaleY and there would no longer be a conflict with flipping the object anymore!
Seriously, it took me hours to figure this out.

My hope is that I can make the entire builder dynamic and not have to make a new one for each animal.  I already have the backgrounds worked out.  If I can figure out how to bring the animals in from XML and keep my functions working I will be thrilled.  Then if i can do that I would like to be able to make it so flash knows what animal to load depending on where the user is coming from.  So if they come from the redpanda.swf it will start with a red panda loaded in.  I think i might be able to get flash to do this using local connection or shared objects, but I am not sure.

I know from class that kind of stuff is pretty easy in PHP, but actionscript tends to make life difficult and suck hours out of my life.  We will just have to see how it goes.


But aside from the builder,  sound and text are the next big things.

Ostrich!

Finished the Ostrich running animation this morning and inserted our meerkat friend into the movie.  I also made a few new buttons during the day.  Tonight I shot the stop motion stills for the gorilla and started editing the images.  Photoshop is giving me some grief so it is taking a while to get the batch editing actions correct.  Very time consuming this stop motion business is.  A lot more fun than hunching over code though!


If the video works correctly below then you can see how the Ostrich animation sequence went.  There is a little more to it, this is just the running cycle.

took a little longer than I wanted, but the new guys are finished

Race to the finish

Easter break has started.  Project is due in 3 weeks.  Still lots to be done.

I started the marathon to the finish today.  Drew up three new animals in Illustrator (red panda, Gorilla, and Ostrich) and I'll be cutting them out and assembling them tomorrow.

Also did a few assorted preparations with new .fla files, xml, and gallery photos to make that process go along smoothly.

I'll have to get the stop motion studio set up again.