Flash Animation Project:
"The Music Video"
Project: The Music Video- Sound in Flash

Overview: Students will be using their newfound Flash skills to create a 30 second animation based upon a lyrical song of their choice.

Getting Started: Create a folder on your network space called "lastname_music_video". All of the files that you create for this project should be saved to this folder.

Video Tutorials to use incorporating Sound into your Music Video: Importing and Editing Sound in Flash.

Getting Your Music: To record music, you will need to do the following first:
  1. Plug in headphones.
  2. Plug in male-male jacks into the green and pink outlets at the back of your computer.
  3. Open your online music from the DIGITAL MUSIC DEPARTMENT OF AMAZON.COM.
  4. Open "Audacity", a sound recording program found in your start menu.
  5. UNPLUG your headphones.
  6. Record your music. You should see peaks in your recording bar. Hit STOP when you are done.
  7. PLUG in your headphones again to listen to your music. If it sounds OK, then...
  8. In Audacity, click on FILE>EXPORT to save your music as a .WAV file.
  9. Import your .wav file into your Flash Library as outlined in the video tutorial above.

PLACING YOUR MUSIC INTO AN ANIMATION:
  1. Rename your Layer 1 as “MUSIC.” Because your music clip is at least 30 seconds long, you probably need about 35 seconds of frames in which to fit your recording. Go out to FRAME 400 and insert a KEYFRAME.
  2. Go back to Frame 1 of your MUSIC layer, hit F11 to open your Library, click on your RECORDING and drag it to your stage. Your song now fills in the MUSIC layer. You can trim the leading or the trailing edge of your music as you need (see the Importing Sound Video Tutorial for instructions on how to do this...).

RULES FOR THE MUSIC VIDEO PROJECT:
  • Your video must be 30 seconds long (at least 360 frames in length.)
  • You must get your music recording from Amazon.com. If they don’t have the song that you want, pick another song.
  • In addition, your song MUST HAVE LYRICS.
  • Your song MUST NOT CONTAIN ANY INAPPROPRIATE LANGUAGE!
  • You will complete your animation using:
    • Imported Graphics
    • Text
    • Movie Clips (either photographic or Flash created)
    • Motion Guides
    • DO NOT USE any Shape Tweening!
  • Your video MUST CONTAIN the following:
    • Animated content that matches and displays the THEME of your music.
    • Small text on the lower right corner for the first 5 or so seconds of your video that lists that Song name, Artist and album. (Much like they do in real music videos!)
    • At least 15 different graphics, each on its own layer.
    • At least 3 different Movie Clips.
    • At least two different Motion Guides.
    • Incorporation of the song’s lyrics into the animation of the video.
    • This is to be a fairly complex project, taking up 3-4 class periods worth of time. If you complete this assignment in 15 minutes, you are not working hard enough and will receive a very poor grade.
THE PART OF THE ASSIGNMENT THAT EVERYONE ALWAYS FORGETS!: Small text on the lower right corner for the first 5 or so seconds of your video that lists that Song name, Artist and album. (Much like they do in real music videos!)

SAMPLES OF MUSIC VIDEOS FROM YEARS GONE BY: Bear in mind, the rules for this project has changed over the years, plus not all of these videos are necessarily the best ever, they are just samples:

PROJECT SUBMISSION:

Projects will be submitted to the class DROP folder on the M: Drive. Please make sure to submit your final work as:

lastname_music_video.fla

This will be a 200 point assignment, and will be graded based upon the adherence to the RULES listed above, as well as Project Work Ethic and creativity of project presentation.