Animation with Flash Report 01

Animation with Flash Report, Entry 01 - My views on Flash

I've started with the final assignment last week (1st March 2010) and began developing the backgrounds for the scenes in the animation "Tales of 2 Ronins".

In between the drawings and colourings of the background, I managed to sneak in some Flash exercises and trying to get accustomed to Flash's environment a little more. I'm still a quite daunted with its complexity (or simplicity, depending on how one looks at it) perhaps mostly due to the fact that I'm so used to other Adobe's programs such as Director and After Effects which have similar interface as Flash. I used to take the coward's way out by avoiding Flash and opted for Director or After Effects and later converting the result to .swf file (thus having more work to finish than necessary). Now I'm facing Flash head-on!

Right. Anyways, I'm still having a few difficulties with the vector tool (namely, the Pen tool) in Flash as I'm very used to Photoshop's Pen tool. The changes done on Flash with the Pen tool can feel a bit confusing and I dont often get the results I was expecting...(e.g tried to drag and change a vertex and ended up with multiple vertices on the same spot! Argh!).
I will be using a lot of bitmap graphics (the backgrounds and the characters) but there will be some vector graphics in the animation too. Things such as sword swiping effects, bubble speeches and other, non-complex images will be vector graphics.

I might be biting more than I can chew at the moment considering the fact that I'm an absolute newbie with Flash (nevermind the fact that I'm good at Director --- it's a different story. Period.) and attempting an over 2 minutes [mostly] hand-drawn animation within slightly over 2 weeks time limit. Ahhh.....