About three years ago I took a weekend course at Central St Martins on Macromedia Flash. The course met for 4 or 5 hours for six Saturdays in a row. I attended all the sessions except one, when my oldest child (who was then only an baby) was sick. The course was taught by Ray Barker, a good teacher with a decent sense of humour, if I can remember properly. The course focussed mainly on the illustration and animation side of Flash: how to draw and make those drawings dance using Flash. I wasn’t interested in that side of Flash; I wanted to learn about how to use Flash to make, well, fancy animated GIFs.
Well, after three years, I finally had occasion to put my training into practice. I designed a new Flash banner for the SURF website. Below is a screen shot of the artwork:
It was pretty tough trying to remember how to write even the most simple of Actionscripts and how to create links and how to fashion the motion tween for fading images. I got there in the end, though.
I wonder if Ray Barker would be proud . . .