Never too late to Flash …

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:

Screen shot of Flash artwork on the SURF website

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 . . .