Part 3: All hail the conquering females!
Ahem… the title of the post in no way is against the boy group who are equally awesome. So I’m late to the blog posting party, but now that I’m here, I can put in my two cents on our group project. I think our group clicked from the get go and once we figured out our roles we were off to the races. Lara took the helm as the project manager and Adrianna and I decided to split the programming/ design duties. Both Adrianna and I had been project managers last semester so it was nice to work on something besides creative briefs and corresponding with clients.
I wasn’t really sure exactly what the technology could do, but once we had our trip to GestureTek I had a better idea of what we could do with their Wall FX. The demos that GestureTek had were pretty basic. Ok, very basic. They had the ability to use swfs with AS2 in Dazzler (the program that displays the effects), but they didn’t have way to use the program with AS3. Uh oh. But we only know how to use AS3. Never fear though, Dan was able to come up with some code to mimic the effects of tracking using blobs to initiate the hit points. From these blobs we were able to set up hit tests and add event listeners to different movie clips to trigger the various animations. It was around this point when we were both setting up the basic animations that we decided, based on Lina’s advice, to hand over the design reins to Adrianna. She did an AMAZING job and although I was a little down at first, I was blown away by the final product and am SO happy that we made that decision. Plus it gave me time to play around with the programming some more and not fret over my artwork. I can’t even begin to describe how much of a relief it was to be given those beautiful finished photoshop files and then just figure out how to apply movement to them.
One of the challenges that I encountered with programming was playing an animation that would continue even when the hit point was triggered again. Dan showed me how to set up a checker that would check to see whether the animation was already playing and then take the correct action based on that information. Another challenge was playing a series of frames along the timeline that would smoothly peter out. I found that I could get the frames to play and stop, but they would stop quite abrubtly once the hit point was no longer recognized. Again, Dan came to the rescue and figured out a way to make the animation skip frames to make it appear as if it were moving slower and thus the movement ending wouldn’t be as jarring. Overall, the programming wasn’t incredibly challenging since we aren’t the strongest coders in the class, but I think the final product definitely makes an impact. Also, the client LOVED it, so it just goes to show that superstar coders or not, the girl group can deliver the goods in the end.
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