Flash for Fantasy
Flash is a bitch. An evil temptress promising so many decadent spoils and making me jump through many flame-covered, explosive hoops to get to her booty. Why is it harder to learn new things as you get older? Has my brain hardened like taffy and become stubborn and inflexible?
In Final Cut Pro I can edit video like a speed demon but I feel helpless and overwhelmed when it comes to Macromedia's Flash. Is this what it feels like to be ninety and trying to send your first text message?
It is rather strange being in a class with a bunch of kids who have never known a world without internet access, cell phones, IMing, HTML, texting and instant access to information. Kids who can code in their sleep and snort derisively at the piddly prospect of Action Script.
Today was a pretty cool class. We all showed our first Flash project which was a music video montage. "Cool," I thought to myself, "I can montage, hell yeah!"
But montaging in FCP and montaging in Flash are two different beasts. So I did the only thing I know how to do in Flash, stop motion animation plus messy doodling to a kick ass Les Paul and Mary Ford song:
I was really impressed by the other student's Flash projects. Not only were a lot of them majorly left wing, political and sticking it to the man something fierce (who said students don't care?), but many of them were thoughtful, beautiful, artistic, fresh and creative.
And then there were the standard, stick figure boy playing guitar animations (two of them) - but even those had something surprising contained within.
Learning new software is hard. Continuing to learn as you age is hard. Not knowing stuff sucks. But it is also invigorating and refreshing to re-activate long dormant brain muscles in an attempt to use a new media to say what you want to say. I will master you fantastical beast that is Flash, or Gordon is not my middle name.
8 comments:
you are superwoman. of course you will do it.
Grrr! YES! I will transform magically into FlashGirl! Leaving stunned keyframes in my wake, whipping vectors into shape and action scripting with the best of them! Eeek, I wish. ;)
I thought what you did was great! I've given up on learning new software that's any more complicated then Word. I can feel my brain harden when I even think about it! It took me forever to pimp my myspace page and I'll I had to do was copy and paste some code! Age does that to you I guess!!
Good luck and more power to you!!
Cool animation. I have to start messin' around with flash at work. I've never worked with motion, so it scares me.
I miss class critiques and seeing everyone else's work. It always got me motivated to do more and work harder.
finally at home i've gotten a chance to see your flash project. my computer at work still doesn't have a damn sound card.
anyway, that was so cool! how do you do such things!
thanks guys! it is kind of overwhelming starting from scratch and i am already SO SO behind in class but i figure if i try to look at it as a fun game and just do whatever little things i can with it, maybe i will figure out my way around eventually.
it was super cool seeing what everyone else in class was doing. you get a real flavor for a person's personality by the project they undertake. many of them were very sophisticated pieces and some lacked artistic flair but were so complicated i couldn't begin to understand how to do them. it boggles my taffy brain.
anyway, you all have inspired me to hit the lynda.com tutorial books again! i think i will back track and start over again at square one! we are just starting action script and i am frightened. eep!
Is Final Cut Pro hard to learn at the begining? I was thinking about getting it, but it is kind of expensive and I heard that you need to be good at computers to understand and work it well.
It was difficult at first BUT I was lucky in that I was editing a movie with my friend so we had a project, a deadline and each other for support. IMovie is a good way to start if you have a Mac and it comes free! But I am addicted to FCP now and can't live without it! It is worth a try!
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