Unit 27 – 2D Animation for Interactive Media Products

A 2D animation can be made very simply, yet look incredible depending on how much time and effort you put into your work.  It can make a webpage look much more pofessional and catches the eye of the viewer who has entered the web page.

A good way of describing the key techniques of computer animation would be my wix page which i use on Facebook. On my wix page it has a home page giving descriptions of my online website it was created to gain followers and get the brand name well known within the area. However people needed to understand what this webpage was about so i included a "About Us" page installed on the wix page. When you left click on the text "About Us" an animation happens instead of opening another web page what it does is erase the text/images within the home page and the "About Us" header and text appears, this is a simple but affective animation making the wix page much more appealing.

Before starting a design which a company has asked you to design you need a specification/brief so you know what your working to achieve. A good example of this is age groups.. if you have been asked to create a website for young children then therefore bright colours Flash images and video's should be used. Young children don't want to read loads of text, they will just get bored and leave the website so it is very important to understand what you are aiming for and hope to achieve. 

The purpose of Flash animation is to catch the visitor of the websites attention, if it be advertising or header whatever the Flash animation is being used for they all have the same purpose, to draw attention, bring more viewers to the web page & to increase revenue.

Again i will use age to describe the expectations and requirements of target users for the product. The younger generation as we all know like colour they enjoy interacting with things & a quick high quality finnish. However the older generation look for a professional looking webpage that is quick easy to use. If a web page doesn't meet the criteria which i have said for a older more mature person they will most likely leave the web page and look somewhere else, these days its all about speed if the viewer knows what they are looking for they want a quick and easy service.

There are many ways in which a Flash animation can be used. A flash header may appear when you enter the website, a greeting page may appear and say "click here to enter the site", many advertisement's may be been shown on the website and a flash image may be being used to cycle through.

As i said before it is important to create animations that meet the specification/brief that was set for the target audience that was set before the design begun for the 1 reason that if it doesn't meet the criteria asked for the the web page will be a fail.

A flash header could be used in a product, what it would do is appear when someone visit's the site catching there attention, again it could be a flash image showing various advertisements to. 

If i was asking a designer to make me a Flash banner i would ask for it to be clean, simple, not to busy but affective. By this i mean working with 2 colours 3 max, that the text is easy to read and people will be able to understand, not to many animations i don't want loads happening and flying around the place at a quick speed where people can't understand the reason behind it all, a couple of animations is fine as long as it is understandable for people.

I would save the flash file either in swf, and then it would depend on what type of software program i used, for example if i was going to be using adobe flashcs5.5 i would save the file as a fla/swf cs5.5.