Internship I Reflection |
By: Bria Mears
*** MUTE page to avoid sound from FLASH file at bottom. |
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I went through a variety of emotions while doing the Internship 1 course with Dr. Kopp. I went from delight to frustration to confusion all in one go. When I first decided to take on the project that Dr. Kopp was excited about, I felt excited too! I knew this would be a great learning experience for me. I learned things about myself and about the program I was using: Adobe Flash. My main goal for this project was to create a new, dynamic website for the Rowan Writing Arts department. Though the project is on-going, I had many complications throughout the semester. However, they were to be expected because of the size of the project and my previous experience with how I was going to get it done.
For roughly the first two weeks of the semester, I began with familiarizing myself with what I was doing. I watched videos on how Adobe Flash worked, I researched HTML5 (considering that as an option to build the website instead), and laid out a basic skeleton of how the site was already laid out – that way I could mimic the original design within my new, improved layout. Once I finished this step, for the next couple of weeks I began Adobe Photoshop design plans (design mock-ups) for how I wanted the design of the site to look. (Design plans included to the right.) I decided how I wanted each page to look, how it would work, and what would happen if you click/scroll over each option on the page. The different sections of the site had a different message that I was trying to portray (the connectivity of the subjects, or how to progress through the major). This was the easy part. After a couple weeks of planning and testing out some Flash tutorials that might be relevant to the project I was working on, I began to work on the actual site itself. My first flash related design was…interesting. I drew the design of the home page in Adobe Photoshop and brought them over into Flash. The design appeared penciled in. I added my first animation (the opening animation) by hand, with attempts to coordinate the movement of the circles frame by frame. I quickly found out that this was a horrible plan. So, I scratched it – the first among many. I redrew the design of the site within the actual program and, boy, did it look ten times better. With the new discovery of the better design, I watched YouTube videos to learn how to tween (animation done by the computer instead of frame by frame). This allowed the opening animation to be much more fluid than before. Then, over time, by analyzing the example file that Dr. Kopp had, I figured out how to use the ease animation. I later scheduled a meeting with Professor Olshefski to borrow some help. However, my meeting with Professor Olshefski caused me to the scratch my previous design – once again. Professor Olshefski suggested that instead of using the tween/ease features within the program, I should learn how to code Flash using ActionScript 3. That was a small wrench in my plan. I, then, had to back up, reorganize everything, and learn something new about Flash that I’d overlooked – but, how useful this feature was. Coding with ActionScript 3 allowed me to do everything I was trying to do in 20 frames, down to 1 frame with simple lines of code; thus, allowing me to condense the file’s size, which is always a great thing. Working with Professor Olshefski, we then figured out how to create a button/hover effect over my design. It was a very useful, necessary meeting. For the rest of the week, I focused on getting in my first course rotation. After deciding with Olshefski that tweening was my best bet with the rotation of the courses on my home page (because of the circular motion being more difficult to code), I began watching how-to YouTube videos and working on the additions of rotating every course along its perimeter. But, they were so fast and they disappeared on hover! Olshefski suggested I turn the course motions into 1 big movie clip that held all the frames instead of trying to do it on the main timeline. This helped me add lots and lots of frames to slow down the motion without it crowding my main timeline and it prevented them from disappearing on hover. The last couple of weeks hit me hard. Thus, the worst “scratch-that” yet. As a group, we collectively decided that some things needed to be deleted to avoid confusion, and the whole page should be zoomed in. That meant changes needed to be made to: (1) Zoom circles, delete 2. (2) Rename/Reorganize instance names/file names (3) Redo coding (4) Redo scroll highlight (5) Redo tweening. This took me roughly two weeks. It’s funny how a simple decision can cause a whole line of problems. Though the project is not done, and I made goals that I simply couldn’t achieve within the time frame. I definitely learned a lot from this experience. Aside from learning technical skills about the program, I learned things about professional life in general, as well. How resilient one must be to take on a task alone of such magnitude; how well one must focus on time management to be able to get things done; how to properly gauge what can get done (especially while worrying about other things, like my other courses). These are all things I will be taking with me on my journey into the real world, especially into my life as hopefully a web developer. |
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