animation update, part, uh, 3?

I did a little work on the trailer this week. I had hoped to have a significant bit of it to show off on the blog by now. I'm still relatively new to the whole animation thing, and I'm still trying to find my rhythm in Flash.

Since I last posted, I have determined that tweening is not the miracle I thought it was. Tweening is where you create two keyframes on the timeline and Flash automatically creates the states between those keyframes. Tweening works flawlessly for movement, not so flawlessly for shape morphing. Adobe hasn't quite worked out the bugs on that one.

The shapes I'm using (plant stems and vines) are complicated. Whenever I try to tween them, even if it's just a little, they implode. They get all wonky on the screen. It's kind of trippy sometimes but not really the effect I was going for. I'm spending more time trying to fix implosions than I would spend just animating frame by frame.

So I'm switching over to frame by frame. I'll bust out the bamboo tablet and get to painting. I'll have more freedom with the drawing that way anyway. There is a slim chance I might have some part of the trailer finished and ready to show off next week. But I also have 30+ pages of on-paper editing changes to enter too, so I guess I'll have to see which way the wind blows this weekend.