…and I'm all out of bubble gum.
Posts tagged beginner
A Breezy Introduction to Basic Animation in Flash
Feb 26th
The tough thing about best practices is remembering to practice them: a while back I started to collect my screencasts on particular topics into one, easy-to-remember link (e.g. iMovie ’09 information is at http://battis.net/link/imovie09). I spent a while uploading my Flash tutorials to one of my class conferences the other day, forgetting to just create the simple link (and thereby limit repetitive work). So, with that in mind…
Here are a few tutorials on animation (at a basic level) in Flash 8 Professional. They need to be re-recorded and cleaned up a little, but they’re a useful starting place for someone totally at a loss when faced with Flash’s ridiculous learning curve. The link to this post and to anything else I might have to say about Flash is http://battis.net/link/flash8
The videos in this sequence are (with links to higher-quality, but less-firewall-friendly, Screencast-O-Matic videos):
- Create a Simple Animation — How to create a simple Flash Professional 8 animation using a Motion Tween between two keyframes.
- Adding Complexity to a Motion Tween — How to use rotation (or scale, skew or other Transformations) to adjust a simple animation.
- Adding a Motion Guide — How to add a Motion Guide layer to a simple animation in Flash Professional 8.
- Shape Tweens — How to use Shape Tweens to animate motion (or, well, shapes) in Flash Professional 8.
- Reverse Exploding Animation — How to have a scattered group of shapes “resolve” themselves into your design in Flash Professional 8 (this was a request from my media design class).
Who are you now?
Feb 4th
A couple days ago, iTunes roused itself out of its torpor and suddenly downloaded a podcast episode from Merlin Mann at 43 Folders, that he posted several months ago. Maybe iTunes knows more about my head than I do, because Merlin caught me right where I am right now, thinking about how we learn and how we do…
Take a minute (well, more like 45 minutes) and at least listen to the podcast, if you don’t actually watch the video. It’s worth it. It’s thought-provoking. And it addresses some real issues in professional development and in teaching and learning.
Merlin’s core idea, throughout, is that the situation of the knowledge worker is to be constantly figuring out not just how to do their job, but what role they’re taking on to do that job — “who am I today?” And he takes on the idea that we’re all advanced beginners, suggesting that, in fact, expertise is real and attainable and hard to quantify. And that the difference between an expert and a master is the ability to articulate your expertise to learners.
There are so many ways that this is both scary and inspirational from a teaching and learning perspective, both in the classroom and working with my colleagues on professional development. So many, in fact, that I’m going to need to come back to this in a few days to really unpack what I’m thinking.
But go watch the video.
