Flash Assignment: "A Walk in the Park"
Assignment: "A Walk in the Park"- Advanced Animation using Movie Clips in Flash

Overview: Students will be using Flash Movie Clips to animate a short film with the theme of “A Walk in the Park.” Your "park" can be anything, from the jungle to the moon, as long as all of the assignment requirements are met.

Animation Contents: Please note that, while the last assignment, the Moral of the Story, was made up of Graphics and Photographs, THIS assignment is completely made within FLASH! You will be drawing your background and all of your movie clips with the brush, line, rectangle and circle tools. If you WISH TO TRY AN ADVANCED ANIMATION WITH GRAPHIC PARTS, SEE MR. B.

The Project:
  1. Start with a blank stage, you can change the color of the stage if you wish.
  2. Think of what your want your “Walk in the Park” to look like. Any park would be fine, with any school appropriate activity going on in the park.
  3. Remember RULE NUMBER #4: The LAYER RULE: “Everything that moves gets its own layer.”
  4. Create a background layer, using your brushes or line tools. Color in the entire background that will not be moving. To make sure that nothing happens to mess up your background layer, you might want to click the DOT underneath the LOCK icon on your background layer to lock it. You can unlock it at any time by reclicking the LOCK icon.
  5. Now, start adding your layers for each of the moving objects in your animation. PLEASE NAME YOUR LAYERS!
  6. Begin on frame one of your first layer, use your line tool or your brush tool to begin drawing your object that will be in motion.
    • Once you have your object drawn, hit F-8 and turn your object into a MOVIE CLIP.
    • Now, if you DOUBLE-CLICK on the MOVIE CLIP, an editing screen will come up, allowing you to animate your movie clip.
    • Using Frame by Frame or Shape or Motion Tweening, animate how your object will be moving. MAKE SURE THAT YOU KEEP YOUR OBJECT FIXED IN PLACE. DO NOT MOVE IT AROUND THE SCREEN! If you do move your object around the screen, it will jump horribly and irrationally on the final animation.
    • EACH MOVIE CLIP MUST BE AT LEAST FIVE FRAMES IN LENGTH, WITH MULTIPLE MOVEMENTS IN THE CLIP. SIIMPLE TWO FRAME ANIMATIONS SUCH AS THE BIRD IN THE TUTORIAL VIDEO WILL NOT BE ACCEPTABLE!
    • When you have completed your animation of your movie clip, click on SCENE 1 in the upper left corner of your stage. This will take you back to your original scene.
  7. Now, use keyframes and Motion Tweening to move your animated movie clip around the screen as necessary.
  8. Complete your animation! You will need one layer for the background, plus FIVE different layers for FIVE different movie clips. Good possibilities for movie clips:
    • Wiggling worms
    • Shining suns
    • Puffing clouds
    • Flapping birds
    • Walking people
    • Running dogs, squirrels, etc.
    • Shining rainbows
    • Flaming comets
    • Blooming flowers
    • Dripping raindrops
    9. PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU ARE DOING WELL WITH FLASH AND TECHNIQUES ARE COMING EASILY TO YOU: Please incorporate a more complicated Movie Clip such as the CAR clip from the Video Tutorial below. If you are breezing through Flash and then give me a lazy "Walk in the Park" with a couple of 2 frame movie clips of birds flapping their wings, expect to get a very poor grade!

Video Tutorials for this Assignment: Advanced Animation in Flash: Creating Movie Clips.

Project Submission: Projects will be saved to your FLASH/WALK folder on the network drive. Please make sure to save your final work as:

lastname_walk.fla (Turn in the RED ICON File)

Grading: This assignment will be worth 100 points, 20 points for each successfully created and implemented movie clip.