However, we cannot just draw one envelope on the stage. Now that we have an idea of the basic steps for our animation, we can start to make a list of the design elements that we will need. You can use arrows and text notes to emphasize and explain the details. A storyboard is simply a sequence of images that represent the major scene changes in your animation. It can be very fancy or just a simple drawing that will visually explain the animation sequence. Imagine trying to explain all that to a potential client. Then, the external swf loads in the same position as the thumbnail and begins to play. As the envelope moves off the stage, the thumbnail image will enlarge to the dimensions of the external ecard swf. The envelope will drop down to the right off the stage and fade away.

Once clicked, the envelope will turn over and the flap will open, revealing a thumbnail image representing the ecard inside. A “Click on the stamp” message and invisible button over the stamp will let the viewer continue the animation to open the envelope. Our envelope will first tumble onto the stage from the upper left and stop when at the center of the stage. We will use the Flash drawing tools and filters to create the 5 vector shapes that make up our envelope and animate these shapes, sometimes together and sometimes alone, to create a complex animation. The character in this animation is the envelope for the ecard. This will be an advanced animation and intro for our ecard. These elements will be the background color, the envelope and stamp colors, the thumbnail image of the ecard and the name and path to the external swf. Our goal is to build the intro with design elements that can be customized to match any ecard that we may wish to load as an external swf. This project will be an intro animation that can be used with any ecard, as long as the frame rate of the two swf files are the same. In this ecard project, we will practice several Flash R skills from drawing vector shapes and applying filters to animating with the new object-based Flash animation and loading the main ecard animation as an external swf.

Ecard design animation