October 5, 2016 (Wed)

Lots of work on Part Three.  Eliminated some stuff that bothered me, added some details.  I've come up with something I like.  I seem to be honing a bit excessively, and not "getting on with it," but at least it's something.

Paid work has fallen off dramatically.  This is not good. 

UPDATE:  Well, I thought I'd combine the first two bits of the new project into one project.  How hard could it be?  I mean, I figured, as an animation package, the folks behind Flash must know that scenes are created in a different order than that in which they are projected.  You shoot all your scenes in one location when you have access to that location, no matter when they appear in the film.  Then you have an editor combine them in the right order.  Snip, snip, make good.

As I said..."Well."

It turns out that this is possible, but it takes much more work than I thought it would.  I mean, staggering amounts of work.  When you create a "Tween" animation in Flash, or use a "Symbol" or a "Bitmap," Flash just happily assumes all of those are the same things, so it just as happily names them "Tween 1" or "Symbol 1" or "Bitmap 1" and so on, within the project.

But when you combine them...Flash doesn't know quite what to do with those various "Tween 1"s in the various projects.  It does ask what you want to do, but that assumes that I know what I want, and that Flash knows how to give me what I want.  And thus, you get results that are not at all what you wanted.  Fortunately, the "Revert" selection is right on the front menu.

So, after spending a bunch of time in each project renaming all the "Tweens" and "Symbols" and "Bitmaps"* to reflect their project of origin, I was able to get the bits to work together.

"Argh," as they say.

*When I create artwork in PhotoShop for use in Flash, I always give the images distinct names, so I know what I need to deal with.  So I have no idea where all these "Bitmaps" came from.  And yes, they were graphics imported from PhotoShop, but no, I didn't just name them "Bitmap 1" and so on.  It may have been something having to do with animating imported graphics, I suppose.  It makes me realize just how much I have to learn....

Anyway, see you tomorrow.