27.9.09

Flash Hair Removal...

Wow, so Flash CS4 really does make you want to rip out your hair! Over the past 2 days I've worked non stop on trying to figure out the Actionscript code I need to make my site work, and lets just say the process has been rather slow.
For the most part I know a bit about the workings of flash, movie/button/graphic symbols, motion/classic tweens, inverse kinetics, timeline animation... The general stuff you need to get started along with some basic VERY basic actionscript (my favorite, and often used "gotoAndPlay ();" and the ever popular "stop ();" commands). But this weekend I think I bit off more then I could chew (At least at the level I am at now) and I jumped deep into the depths of actionscript and began my adventures into adding child symbols and instances to the stage with button commands and embedding Vimeo video's into the pages (which I am beginning to regret) and learning how to use the tween commands flash has built into it that you can access within the actionscript coding.

So what has all this hair pulling, too many cigarette breaks, loss of sleep, and general anxiety about a language that is only used to communicate with a computer give you?.... this:




So THIS is what has caused all of my anxiety and sleep loss... And I doubt if I'll even use it in my final site. Basically what I was trying to accomplish was to create a portfolio page that mimicked a CSS light box effect (because I don't know anything about CSS yet... maybe its easier for this effect.....) but would play an embedded Vimeo file... I got it to work, sort of, I'm still not completely satisfied with it an may end up embedding an .swf file into the site instead of embedding an external URL... plus I still need to design the rest of the site because right now I've just got a white box with a light drop shadow and no navigation at all... Hopefully eventually I'll be able to create the highly interactive site that I have in my mind, but for now just to get something out there I think I'll be designing something that functions well and looks nice.

So feel free to click on the images and take a look, they've been hyperlinked to bring you to the website that is slowly eating my soul. (and yes, I know sometimes you will receive an error with the page that has the vimeo link embedded into it... I just can't figure out how to get rid of it... similar errors occur with the flash files I've uploaded on here as well... and they are driving me mad!)


Flashing mad,
Greg

1 comment:

  1. Aw, Greg! You're doing a mighty fine job with flash. I know how you feel. I supposed it'll be like this for all of us until we learn more about action script and get used to it. As far as I know, CSS lightbox is only for pictures and not video. Coding lightbox is actually not that difficult. In any case, you're still ahead of the game! It's good that you're practicing these skills now, so it'll get easier later on ;)

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