Brian Jepperson - Final Project

Well here it is, my final project. Note that the video above doesn't show all of it, since it's interactive. Click on this link to see it in flash.

The snowman I made with some primitive circles, and the arms, hat, nose, and scarf I drew with the pen tool and filled it in, then made it into a symbol. The scarf used bezier curves. There are two tree symbols, but I duplicated them, scaled them, and flipped them to give some variety. For the snowy hill background, I painted it in three layers, ground, water, and snow on top. For the falling snow, I made a really big rectangle that is about twice the size of the stage, and then used the deco tool to spread snow flakes all over it. Then I animate that big rectangle downward.

For animation, the snowman's wave is obviously done with the bone tool, when the snowman slides I use a motion tween, and snow foreground uses a classic tween. The silly little CAS 175 sign in the upper right uses the 3-D tool to achieve the wierd spinning affect. If you look closely, the Merry Christmas text changes color. I actually have a gradient that reverses itself which gives the appearance of flashing. That was done with a shape tween.

I have three buttons. I tried to make them look website-ish. One starts and stops the animation. One takes you to a cool little Santa flash site, and the other makes the snowman slide down the hill. The start/stop and slide were achieved pretty simply making taking the control to various parts of the timeline. The only sound I used was one attached to the buttons. When you click the buttons, they make a slightly annoying little clicking sound.

What worked well? I like how the snow turned out, and I'm satisfied with the buttons. Challenging areas are always the artistic parts for me. I probably spent 3/4 of the time on this project just trying to make a decent looking snowscape (the hill and the trees). I'm still not totally satisfied with that (it's kind of amusing how the snowman is so HUGE relative to the trees, lol) but oh well.