Flash Animations

Flash animations are really slick. With Flash, you are able to have many moving components with a small file size. The best thing about Flash is that the movements are smooth. This puts Flash animations way ahead of animated GIFS which can have jerky or staccaco-like movements. The only downside to Flash animations is that you need a Flash player to installed on your computer to see them. The good news is that the player is a free download and you can get one here. If you have a newer computer, probably have the player already installed.

My Flash Clock

I created a clock with moving gears and spheres in Flash. It is a bit of overkill perhaps, but is shows how powerful flash is for programming many sophisticated, smooth movements. It keeps very accurate time, too. If you would like to see it, click on the word clock. (Click on the back arrow on your browser to return to this page.)

• Penguin On Ice
• Jack in the Box
• Smiley Devil
• Glitter

Animations with Sound

• Tough Duck
• Jack the Lion
• A Portrait Talks
• Fool Me Once
• Poor People
• President George (Dagwood) Bush
• New X-Files
• Kiss Me!!!

The art of animation is fun. In fact, I would say that it is so much fun for me that I create it with a smile on my face. Getting images to move and presenting an illusion to the audience are just two of the facets of animation that I enjoy.

There are several different kinds of animation. On this pages, you will find links in the left and right columns to three of then: Flash, GIFS, and Animations with Sound.

Flash Animations

Flash animations are the newest type of the animations dicussed here. One advantage of them is the ability to program sophisticated movements and present an illusion to the audience. The penicl writing 'My Art' is an example of what I am talking about. It is an illusion that the pencil is printing the letters. The illusion is easy to do in Flash and although it could be done in a GIF, the file size would be very large. See the column on your left for more information on Flash.

GIF

Do you remember when you were younger drawing pictures of, e.g., a man walking on the edges of several book pages and then flipping those pages to see the man walk? Well, that is how a GIF works, There are several frames that show different stages of movement, and then using a GIF animator to 'flip' them. The more frames, the smoother the motion and the bigger the file size.

Animations with Sound

Animations with Sound (in the case of the examples in the column to your right, speech) can be made in different ways, In essence, you take an image and trap the pixels around the mouth and synchroize their motion to a wav file. It is really fun to do. albeit a tad tedious. See if you can identify who provided the wav files in samples to the right, They are all from famous people and have been synchronized to mouth movements of toys, critters and evem paintings. I hope youu enjoy seeing them as much as I enjoyed creating them.