Prepare for this course:

• Design a course site for this class with four Web pages:
  Home/Table of Contents (default.htm), Web Log (weblog.htm), Portfolio (portfolio.htm), and Contact (contact.htm)
  Follow this illustration for file structure
  
  
• Reading: Animation Basics and How Web Animation Works

Intro to Course: The Web and New Media Technologies refresher; Web Logs

Introduction to moving images and animation: principles of design; technologies and software; vector and raster graphics. Looking at animated banner ads; communicating a message

Animated banner ads; creating animated Gifs in Imageready.

Read: A Summer Ad Flight with British Airways

Review class lecture: considerations, design, animated GIFs

Update your course site and your Web log-- find some more animated GIFs that inspired your design and link to them.

banner ad assignment: Create 2 animated Gifs in ImageReady. These should then be inserted in an HTML page and put online (in the banners folder of your portfolio folder), link to them from your assignments page.

Assignment 1 banner ads are due
Introduction to Flash and motion graphics. Vector vs. Rastor graphics, Good and bad examples of motion design and kinetic typography. Introduce assignment 2, film credits.

In class: practice session in Flash with movie properties, key frames, library items, motion tweening.

Homework Exercise: Create 5 different motion tweens; experiment with key frames and tweening size, rotation, motion ease in and out.

Who is Saul Bass? Read this interview and this article (click on #56 Saul Bass). Look at some of his work at this Saul Bass Web Site (see especially Psycho) and at the Comm Arts Website

Watch the title sequences for The Talented Mr. Ripley and read the article about the production. Visit Imaginary Forces, a production company in California that is well known for title sequences in broadcast and film.

Choose a film for the next assignment and put together a storyboard for your own credit sequence.

Find examples of effective and non-effective kinetic typography on the Web and link to them in your web log.

Read: "Getting Started with Flash", chapter 2 of Brooks and Patton; and chapters 7 and 10: "Symbols and Instances" (pgs. 167-189) and "Using Animation to Build Movement" (pgs 235-274).

Keep playing with Flash-- don't neglect it again until next week or it will be like starting all over again. Open up Flash and play around while you read the chapters.

Watch film credits and discuss kinetic typography.

When looking at sites, take care to notice the small details, tiny hops, handmoved touches that enliven and give character to motion. Pay attention to these details, and take time to try and include such subtleties in your own animation.

In-class Flash tutorial: tweening, keyframes, size, alpha, tint properties; exporting and linking to Flash objects in Dreamweaver

Homework Exercise: Experiment with the different text effects we discussed in class. Come up with 3 different examples of kinetic typography for potential use in your titles.

Read chapter 5 of Franklin and Patton, "Sound" and chapter 6, "Bitmaps"

Begin working on the credits assignment, and have a rough draft for class review next week.

Update web log describing your ideas in your film credits rough draft.

Review Rough Drafts

Flash continued...Importing sound and bitmaps into Flash. How to use scenes and understanding movie clips.

Read chapter 11, Franklin and Patton, "Basic Actions for Building Interactivity"

Update web log reflecting on film credits assignment. What do you feel works well? What can stand to be improved?

Assignment 2 film credits are due
Introduction to simple interaction. Making a button and having it control the timeline. (Replay movie button) Embed swf movie in HTML using Dreamweaver, adjust properties.

Intro to next assignment: multimedia narrative--will include sound-- this can be a poem, a piece of prose/creative writing, a story, a children't story, a myth, you can use your own writing or someone elses.

After look at the pieces in the extensive list of examples, come to the next class on the 10th with a two-page write up describing what you are doing and a detailed story board that clearly illustrates what you are planning on doing.

Write a short proposal with thumbnail sketches describing your idea for the next assignment, Multimedia narrative.

Visit all of the Web sites in the Multimedia Narratives list.

Update web log commenting on two specific multimedia narratives that you have found and why you think they are successful.

Review Proposals and Look at multimedia narratives.

ActionScripting Part I: jumping to different parts of the timeline using button and frame actions.

In class: interactivity exercise; download FLA and add actions to timeline

Read "Why Flash is Evil," and the responses it generated AND: "Flash is 99% Bad," and Josh Davis' letter and Hillman Curtis' response and respond to this discussion in your Web log.

Have a concept and revised storyboard for the multimedia narrative assignment. Choose the images (photographs, artwork, graphics) and sound you will be using in this assignment and import them into Flash. (You should have all of your "assets" in the Flash "library") After you have decided on and imported your sound and images, then begin working in the timeline.

Multimedia Narrative; Flash techniques and methods of storytelling, downloading sounds.

ActionScript: drag and drop, load movies, preloaders

Finish multimedia narrative project. Update web log with an entry reflecting on the creation and intentions of your work.eb log.

Prepare the conceptual analysis phase of your Web Site Redesign project. Include thumbnail sketches. Update web log with links to any developer resources-- dynamic content, stock photography, javascript cut and paste scripts, etc.