Cartooning- should i use scenes?

1

hi all,

i’m making a short flash-based cartoon, which comprises of about 30 shots (which will all need to be separated somehow, or chaos would reign on my one superlong timeline!)

i’m wondering, would it be best just to have a separate ‘scene’ for each one so they would all be contained in the one flash file, or should i just make separate *.fla’s and use actionscript to call the scenes in order? (if i do this option, i’ll still do more than one shot per .fla, but not heaps).

also,will i be able to get it onto a VHS video tape at all (in any format)

thanks a lot
Stuart

2

I suppose scenes would be more suited for animation projects. It will definitely help you organize and manage your timeline.

What I would do is use scenes in combination with movieclips. I think a mixture of both would be good.

As to your question as to how to record your flash to VHS, I’m not too sure. I’m assuming that you’ll need to convert it to a movie file format like avi or mov then use a program like adobe premiere along with some video equipement to record it to VHS.

3

thanks for the quick reply EG

when you say “in combination with movie clips” do you mean to put parts of the animation in clips that are then held on the general timeline? what i’ve done so far is to animate things like the character’s walk cycle inside their clip, so i can just put the clip on the timeline and move it sideways, and the walk will play as well… is this what you’re saying?

also, i’ve got all the vhs and premiere and stuff at school, so that should be fine :slight_smile: saving as .avi or .mov can be done from in flash right?

thank you =)
Stuart

4

*Originally posted by iLikePie *
**when you say “in combination with movie clips” do you mean to put parts of the animation in clips that are then held on the general timeline? what i’ve done so far is to animate things like the character’s walk cycle inside their clip, so i can just put the clip on the timeline and move it sideways, and the walk will play as well… is this what you’re saying? **

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. =)

As for exporting to avi or mov, flash mx is capable of exporting as mov. Just go to File > Publish Settings and you’ll see the Quick Time (mov) check box.

5

cool, thanks a lot…

i love forums where you can actually get clear help :slight_smile:

Stuart

6

One more thing I would like to add is that if you convert your flash movie to a mov file, you’ll loose all interactivity (if you have any that is).

Because a movie is linear, once converted to mov, the flash movie will play straight through ignoring all actionscripts including stop actions. Basically it will play the main timeline from beginning to end.

7

ooooooooh… thanks for adding that… so even if i’ve just got stop(); scripts to control certain parts it’ll ignore them? this will cause a few problems methinks…

is it the same with movie clips i.e if i have a clip which is placed in a scene, and has a short animation that should be repeated a few times (like a walk cycle) will it keep replaying while it’s on the major timeline because it’s self contained? or will i have to go into all my movie clips and manually copy the frames so they will ‘replay’ the same action?

i don’t have any interactivity as such, but there is a tiny bit of scripting…

thanks
Stuart

8

I’m not 100% sure about movieclips, but I’m guessing that it will play it through once only without looping.

Also any stop() actions will be ignored, it will play the main timeline straight through.

9

any animated movieclips are also ignored when publishing as mov or avi or whatever. I made a movie like this, and I had simple AS all through it, stop. goto, etc. I had animated clips and nested clips, so the only way to get it onto vhs was to open the swf fullscreen, plug in some video-out cables to the computer, and press record. (actually it was for an all day fair, so I left the swf on repeat and filled the two hour tape with my movie, so I could leave it “on repeat” in the vcr during the day.)
As far as organization, I was very unexperienced at the time, so I started with a scene for each shot, and got tired of the complexity of just working with the fla file, so I started a new file for the next “section.” gradually I started putting more and more onto the main timeline, even having quite a few cuts happen just by putting a keyframe division on the main timeline.

When it was done I had 7 fla’s that were different sections, and inside those, some of the shots were in their own scenes,a nd some were combined. Sometimes I had a whole scene with one movieclip that just stayed still, and all the animation happened on the timeline in that clip. Other scenes had enormous clips tweening at the same time as nested clips, (for perspective effects) that ran really slow and (because I basically used a screen capture to get it on tape) that came out in the final vhs, too.

I tried pasting all the frames from each of the 7 files into one fla, but i had movieclips with the same names in my library, and it started replacing things i didnt want replaced. It was a mess. The end result had one swf that loadMovie’d the other 7 into a frame, nextframe’d when they were done. This meant that on the vhs, there was a blank frame that flashed on the screen 7 times during the film, where the divisions were. (Not always a good place for that either) My advice is, dont let it get complicated. It is going to get big, just dont let it get out of control. Decided ahead of time on a method of organization. (and a time length) Keep it in one file, and save every now and then as Movie001.fla Movie002.fla Movie003.fla Use tweening carefully. It is not for the web, and file size doesnt matter on VHS, so you can insert a tween just to get the positions and then break it up into keyframes( to make it play smoother.)

Its up to you whether you make every cut a scene division. If you can use the same layers in both shots, then I say the cut between them doesnt need to be its own scene change.

Good Luck! Be sure to show it off at kirupa when youre done!`

10

I’ve made a couple of little Flash cartoons, and I tend to use one of two ways.

Obviously there’s scenes, you can do it like that so your timeline doesn’t get horrendously long. :slight_smile: When one scene is finished you just skip to the next one.

The other way I did it was to build up just a selection of movie clips for each area, then build a larger clip containing the animation for one cartoon scene, then put all of those into one clip and put that on the stage. :slight_smile: So practically no timeline at all. :slight_smile:

11

sounds like lots of good advice here… i’ve pretty much decided to use a combination of scenes and a few different main .fla’s to contain them, or would having them ALL in one be better…? it sounds like that’s what you’re saying clown (but i’m not sure if i read it correctly), i’m just thinking that it would get a bit complex. But i guess since it’s a major school project, it’s all been storyboarded and stuff, so the organisation should be ok.

the only thing i’m worried about now is converting it to VHS… i might have to opt for your method of doing the video-out from computer, clownstaples… apart from the 7 blank frames, did that technique work? it’s just that i’ve already used a few nested clips, because, like kit mentioned, then i practically have no main timeline = easier to work with. I figure that i can use the video out, and then edit with premiere to get rid of those blank frames i guess

anyway, thanks for all the help so far, this is very valuable and should save me some dilemmas later on

Stuart

p.s i’ll see about posting when i’m done, but it’s already horrendously big (.swf is over 120kb) because i’m not paying any attention to filesize since it’s not for web