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.