Flash Assignment: "The Spaceship"
Flash Animation: Motion Guides and Publishing Movies

Overview: Students will be using their newfound Flash skills to create a short animation in which a shapeship crashes into a planet and explodes.

Before you start: Create a folder called "lastname_spaceship" on your network drive. Save all of the files for this assignment into this folder.

The Project:

• Step One- Getting your Pictures:

  1. To start, go onto the Internet and collect a total of four different pictures and save them to your Flash folder (give them names you can understand, like “ship.jpg” or “planet.jpg”):
    • A large sized “Outer Space” scene, at least 800 x 800 pixels.
    • A large sized “Planet” picture.
    • A picture of a spaceship (comic or graphic is fine). This does not have to be all that big.
    • A picture of an explosion. Smaller picture is fine.
  2. In Fireworks, use any tools necessary to CUT OUT the Spaceship picture and the Planet picture from their backgrounds.
    • Use FILE>EXPORT PREVIEW to save these two pictures with transparent backgrounds as .GIF Files, make sure that ALPHA TRANSPARENCY is selected at the bottom of the dialog box.

• Step Two- Creating your Flash Movie and Setting up your movie:

  1. In FLASH, start a new stage, save your movie as “lastname_spaceship.fla”
  2. Use FILE>IMPORT TO LIBRARY to get each of your 4 pictures into your F11 Library.
  3. Create a total of THREE new layers, so that you have FOUR total. Label your four layers (from bottom to top) as:
    • “Outerspace”
    • “Planet”
    • “Spaceship”
    • “Explosion.”

• Step Three- Creating your SPACESHIP Animation:

  1. To start with, bring your SPACESHIP picture on to the stage on the first frame of your spaceship layer. One of the requirements of this assignment is that you must turn your spaceship into a movie clip (F8>MOVIE CLIP). How you do this animation is up to you. Here are some ideas:
    • Create a movie clip with your spaceship where ship engines are flaming out the back of the ship.
    • Create a movie clip with your spaceship where there are little lights flashing on the side of your ship.
    • Create a movie clip with your spaceship where there is a little antenna emitting radio waves on top of the ship.
  2. When you have completed the animation of your spaceship movie clip, bring in your OUTERSPACE AND PLANET on their layers by dragging the proper image from your F11 library onto the stage.
    • Click on your OUTERSPACE and PLANET and F8 them, turning them into GRAPHICS, instead of Bitmaps.
    • Resize your outerspace image so that it a little bit bigger than your stage, this will allow you to move your background and still keep your spaceship and planet on the stage when you are animating.
    • Head out to frame 200 on your Outerspace layer and put in a keyframe. Move your outerspace picture slightly. Put MOTION tweening on frame 1 of the Outerspace layer. Your space now moves very slightly through your movie.
    • Do the same thing with your planet. Place it and resize it on the stage so that it takes up about 1/5th of the screen, then move it slightly from the 1st frame to the 200th frame using motion tweening.
  3. Animating your Spaceship:
    • Move your spaceship off stage on Frame ONE and then put a keyframe at about frame 150 on the Spaceship layer.
    • On Frame 150, move the spaceship to the surface of the planet. Use the SCALE tool to make it very, very small.
    • Put MOTION tweening on frame 1 of the spaceship layer.
    • CLICK on the spaceship layer to highlight it and click INSERT>MOTION GUIDE.
    • Click on the First Frame of the GUIDE: Motion Guide Layer. Using the PENCIL TOOL, draw the path for your spaceship to follow from outside the stage to the crash landing on the moon.
    • Then, click on Frame One of the Spaceship Layer and move the center dot to the front end of the Motion Guide.
    • Click on the Last Frame of the Spaceship Tween and move the center dot to the back end of the motion guide.
    • On frame one of the Spaceship layer, turn on “Orient to Path” which is underneath the TWEEN drop down box. Run your movie to see if you like it better with the “Orient to Path” turned on or off.
  4. The Explosion:
    • At the frame where your spaceship stops, put in a Blank Keyframe on your EXPLOSION layer.
    • Now, go out ONE FRAME and put in another Blank Keyframe. On that frame, pull your explosion picture from your F11 library and place it on the stage.
    • F8 your explosion picture and turn your explosion into a graphic.
    • Make your explosion picture very small on the starting frame, go out 10-15 frames and put in another keyframe. Make your explosion larger on that layer. Put in some motion tweening with a rotation to show your explosion happening.
    • If you wish, you can now make your explosion shrink back to nothing to complete the animation.

Video Tutorial for this Assignment:

Project Submission:

When you are done with your movie, you will be publishing it, so that it can be seen on the internet with a browser or as a Graphic File that anyone can see on their computer. To do this, you need to first:

Saving Flash Files as HTML Pages:

  • Save your movie, using FILE>SAVE AS. This will save your movie as a Flash file, but we would like to be able to actually view your movie on the Internet, so…
  • Now, click FILE>PUBLISH SETTINGS. This will bring up the Publish menu. We are interested in the HTML tab at the top of the window. Click on it.
  • Most things will stay the same, but make sure that you change the DIMENSIONS box to say “MATCH MOVIE.” This will allow your movie to be seen as you designed it, not stretched or changed in any way.
  • Make sure that the PLAYBACK>LOOP button is set to ON. This will allow your movie to run until stopped.
  • All other boxes can stay the same as they are.
  • Click the PUBLISH button. This will create an HTML (Internet) file in your folder that has the same name as your Flash file.

Saving Flash Files as Animated GIF Images:

  • Save your Movie, using File>SAVE AS. Now, if you want to be able to see your file as an animation graphic...
  • Click on FILE>PUBLISH SETTINGS. This will bring up the Publish Menu. Make sure that the GIF Image (.gif) checkbox is checked. Then click on the GIF Tab at the top of the window.
  • If you want your animation to stay at the same size as when you created it, leave the "Match Movie" box checked. If you want to change the size of your animation (for instance, if you are making an animated avatar for use online), uncheck the Match Movie box and then input the size that you are needing.
  • Check the "Animated" box in the PLAYBACK section and make sure that "Loop Continously" is checked. This will loop your animation over and over again.
  • Leave everything else the same for now and click PUBLISH. This will create a file called "filename.GIF" in your folder. You can now send or upload this file however you wish.
  • If your GIF looks strange because of changed colors or stuck animation, you might consider playing with the DITHER and PALETTE TYPE options until your animation looks its best.
  • Copy your "lastname_spaceship.GIF" folder to my dropbox for grading.

Grading: This will be a 100 point assignment, graded on the proper use of the Motion Guide (30 points), creation of a spaceship movie clip (30 points) and the manipulation of the 4 different imported graphics (40 Points).

Please note that I will DEDUCT 50 PERCENT OF YOUR GRADE if you do not turn in an ANIMATED GIF file, as outlined above.