Cool animation. Looks like your doing really good. Not that I know anything. I just make stick figures dance around.
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i was learning how to make a dude walk in flash when i thought i'd turn it into a proper little movie type thing, its my first one so please be kind, theres no sound as i aint got round to learning that part yet, but will do soon. anyway..enjoy 'learning to walk'
edit - thanks to http://psychopath.newgrounds.com/ for teching me about preloaders and the little bit of actionscripting at the end to make the vid loop :)
D0S81 responds:
thanks, i'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of sweet f*** all. in other words i go through phases of doing this or that. from drawing pics, to making music, to starting a youtube gaming channel, learning how to survive a zombie apocalypse, ya know, the usual. and this was one of those 'i fancy making a cartoon' days. i have other cartoons, but this is the only one i've finished.....which is something else i do a lot, not finish stuff because i tend to think of something else before i get to finish something i was doing. so if i do do anymore, i don't know when it will be, what it will be, or if it will even just *be* in the first place. Anyway, my point is making stick figures dance around doesn't mean you don't know anything....it means you know how to make stick figures dance around. everyone starts somewhere. just keep doing it. don't put yourself down cuz you think what you've done isn't good enough. Do them for yourself and not for others, obviously you want people to see and like what you do, but i mean do it because you like doing it if that makes any sense? Put them on the web, and then obviously ignore the trollers, adore the ones that love what you've done, but most of all, listen to the ones that give you constructive criticism, like the comment i got from FUBAKA for this video. if everyone tells you everything you do is great, how can you ever improve? i would love to see a video of your dancing stick figures. i know us creative types can be our own worse critics, but someone told me once that the best things they ever created were usually the ones they had doubts about, weren't sure if they were finished, or did't come out exactly as they had in mind. and looking back at my early drawings, its so true. so keep making those stick figures dance dude. maybe they could give top hat dude here a run for his his money, or at least a walking dance :)
You appear to be off to a good start. Here's how you deal with sound in Flash movies: first your audio file needs to be in the WAV format because Flash is finicky when it comes to MP3s, you'll want to import the sound to the library since it won't import into the timeline like photos. Then you'll drag and drop it to the timeline.
In the properties you'll notice a menu for settings like Stream, Start, Event & Stop. Be sure to pick Stream for linear movies, Start mode forces the audio to play to its full length before it'll play again, regardless of where you are in the timeline. Event will also force audio to play to its full length but it won't prevent new plays of the same audio, meaning that the audio can play in an overlap, multiple times if the frame length is short enough. Stop mode will literally stop the audio file no matter what setting you gave to it prior; the way that works is that you have a set of frames with the audio on either Stream, Start or Event mode and follow it up with a frame with the same audio that you want to stop under Stop mode.
We're also now going into audio optimization. When you look at you publish settings [under the File tab] you'll see two settings called Audio Stream and Audio Event. You can change either of these to enhance or compress the audio in your SWF when publishing. The settings I keep are MP3, 160KBPS, Stereo. If you'd like to save these settings for future publications, you're gonna have to create a new profile [the [+] symbol] and import the profile the next time you use it.
Next is the last thing I have to say about audio. Don't import files with more than 44,000 Hz, Flash can't properly handle anything above that threshold and will compensate by decelerating the audio.
Next is something of a universal convention, for the record, this is something to be expected on Newgrounds; get a preloader. You can get them for free right here: http://www.newgrounds.com/downloads/preloaders/
Add one of those to the first frame of your Flash movie and you're good to go. If you want the animation to continue looping and skip the preloader, add some ActionScript to the last frame of your movie: gotoAndPlay(2);
You've got better potential than most of the chucklefucks around here. Keep it up.
D0S81 responds:
chucklefuck..lol. thankyou so much for this, Hyun (aka flying panda) sent me an email explaining this aswell, but i accidently deleted it and didnt wanna bug the guy by keep asking questions, he is a busy bee after all. so i appreciate your help. very in depth. the first time i tried doing audio was when i was practising lip syncing to a song, but whenever i pushed play to check that it went with the words, it would play the whole song, and wouldnt stop, and i couldnt just listen/watch a part in the middle. so this helps so much.
The animation wasn't bad by any means, but on Newgrounds, we expect cartoons of more substance.
You're off to a good start with the style though. If you expanded this and added some music at least, you'd have a good thing going here.
D0S81 responds:
thankyou, i appreciate the constructive criticism, a lot of the work on newgrounds blows my mind, 'Mr Bees' comes to mind. the guy that does that has some skill. It was actually 'Hyun' of those awesome stick fights that told me about macromedia 8> I know i have a long long way to go before imanywhere next to that caliber of animation, but fingers crossed. Its very time consuming, i worked on this for about four days for a few hours a day. it only takes so long as im self taught. hopefully the next vid i do will be better.
This is good! I really like the art style and simplicity to this! Great job D0S81!
D0S81 responds:
thankyou so much
this is pretty amazing to say this is your first attempt at flash and that hand looked awesome
D0S81 responds:
ah, the hand is all due to the awesome trace capability of macromedia 8