Old Work- Shooting Gallery

This is an old animation I did for my FMP at Newark College, this isnt my final piece it is just something a little extra I did to assist the project. It involves a game layout where the player shoots my tutors and fellow students... great eh? (I bet if my new tutors read this they will be a little scared.) Despite all this I dont like the sound effects used (I think they are too dominating over the music,) and would like to change them. Firstly I thought I should mention that the media course at my college does not have Flash MX or any software like Flash MX. I got a copy for myself at christmas 2005 and since then I tought myself how to use it. At first I had a slow rubbish computer and did the best I could with it. But thanks to my shiney new laptop I got last May I get to spread my wings much more.

I got the inspiration by simply looking down an old part of the College. I dont know what sparked the idea but I think it was the shape of the buildings and the many places a person could just pop up out of nowhere. So on that note I got everyone to pose for me holding weapons and took there pics using a Kodak Easyshare 5 mega pixel camera. Then I took a pic of the area I was going to use paying careful attention to what shapes I could fit into the frame. I needed several shots of guys, and 2 shots of girls so they were the targets your not suppost to shoot. Also I took a few funny pictures for a laugh but one turned out to be very useable in the game/animation, which was a funny looking head that could be a bonus target.

After I had got these pictures home I used Flash and for some Adobe Photoshop to cut them out and put a rough white frame around them. Then using Flash MX 2004 each image was named and stored in the file's library then through that an image could be re-used as many times as I needed. each use of the image was given its own size and movement path to follow. The scenery was cut up into several layers so objects could go in between each building so to give the illusion that they were popping up from places. The crosshair movement, bullet holes, scoreboard and when the targets shake from being shotwere all manually done frame by frame. I prefer to do this technique where relevent because its more personal and you can get more from an animation, I've got endless patience for things like this so i dont mind hours of the same thing at all. Finally some music which I chose from an old Sega game called Sonic CD. The finished piece had to be played over several hundered times to look for errors or problems that needed fixing. But by the end it looked really good, the master version looks crisp and highly detailed compared to its lesser Youtube version.

I'm planning to do another one, featuring Nottingham Trent or my student flats. Any comments or ideas are welcome.