Homework 2 - Your First Animation

The purpose of this assignment is to experiment with creating vector, bitmapped, imported cast members in Director, and learn the basic animating techniques available in Director.

Assignment: Your first animation is really the excuse to learn well the software we will be using. Feel free to go beyond the required steps described below, so that you can get more experience with Director.

Open Director and create a new movie. Save your file as name_hw2.dir (where name is your puma account name; mine, for example, would be called pmetaxas_hw2.dir)

Make 3 cast members (some of them should be vector objects while others should be bitmapped objects so you can experiment with both).

Choreograph a set of interactions between your cast members. Make them move and/or change over time. But their interaction should not be random, there must be some logic behind it. Determine clearly in your head what the "story line" is. It doesn't have to be an elaborate feature film, but don't let them just move around arbitrarily.

Copy the running/jumping man cast members from the SHARED.CST file into your internal cast. (You will need first to save this CST file onto your own computer and open it from within Director. Once you are done copying the cast members, you should delete it.) Use these cast members to fulfil some of the requirements below.

Requirements: Use each of the following techniques, and be sure to experiment with them enough to understand them:

• Cast To Time
• Space To Time
• Step Recording
• In Betweening (with all its various kinds of tweening)
• Modifying sprites
• Paste Relative

Among the things you could do in your animation:

• You can change location of the sprites
• You can transform the sprites right on the stage (by stretching, etc.) or through the Modify> Sprite> Properties window
• You can create a sequence of cast members in the paint window, duplicating and varying the cast members as you go (i.e. a shape that gets gradually erased, or gradually grows, or gradually gets thinner, or bluer, etc. They could also conceivably change in size, shape, color, or be transformed by rotating, skewing, distorting, or stretching.)

What to turn in: Inside your CS215 folder in your puma directory, create a hw2 folder. Inside this folder place your name_hw2.dir file. When you publish your work, it produces a separate name_hw2.html file. In this file add a couple of paragraphs explaining what you did and how you covered each of the requirements. Make sure you get the web permissions right so that you can see your work on the web!

Relevant sample movies:

• Mary Ayabe's Escape
• Ran Tao's Moon Phases