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 userName-basic-animation.dir in the appropriate directory (ps02 for this assignment). Of course, userName is your own user name on puma.

Make 4 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 jumping man cast members from the running-man.dir file or those from the walking-man.dir into your internal cast. Use these cast members to fulfil some of the requirements below.

Requirements: Create both bitmap and vector cast members. Use each of the following techniques, and be sure to experiment with them enough to understand them:

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

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.)

To turn in your work, in your ps02 directory folder place youruserName-basic-animation.dir file. When you publish your work, it produces a separate userName-basic-animation.html file. Edit this file using a text processor. In the .html 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 using a browser on the web!

In addition to how well you executed the assignment, you will be graded on how well you followed the specifications of the assignment, and whether you completed its Assessment questionnaire.

Relevant sample movies:

• Ran Tao's Moon Phases
• Rose Heydt Private Island
• Lorraine Shim: The Walking Man
• Iva Gishin's First flight