The February 2012 Tutorial Discussion

[Gare]

Thanks for the suggestions and contributions, folks.

handrawn's reference for bouncing is a good one. And yes, you can very speed in a Flash animation, although please let me point out that Xara's animation engine might be Flash, but its output can be anything you like, AVI, GIF, or SWF, so don't immediately think that your presentation is constrained to a Flash animation; it's not.

Now if you want to get tricky and fool your audience for a moment or two, create an animation that cycles twice, in other words you put two cycles in the animation and then time the second one a little more slowly.

So that when the ball goes through a bounce cycle, once it's fast and the second time it's slow. Or the second time the ball lands in a slightly different place than the first time. The Shockwave standard is pretty tolerant about the number of unique key frames you have in an animation: 5 or 10 won't significantly impact on the saved file size.

handrawn, does this touch on what you're showing? The random quality?

There are a lot of things you can do, based on a simple motion that cycles. Yes, very the speed, the destination, if you want to get bizarre, change the colour of the ball over time!

The key to keeping your audience's attention is to make your animation cycle as visually interesting as possible, because the point is to build something that has a 5 second cycle, but keeps your audience watching for 15 seconds.

Attached is one of the most ambitious SWF animations I was ever stupid enough to create. I think there are four complete drawings in the file, but I think many people would watch is for several seconds. Again, this is a cycle: the rocking horse goes forward, to the center, back and then center again.

-g-