Unit 27 - 2D Animation for Interactive Media Products.

The main use of 2D animation in interactive products, for example on a website, is to add some movement to the page, and to stop it from being static, it is also used to draw your attention to it for a split second. 2D animation is often, and most commonly used for banners, for example I made a 2D flash banner for my one page website.

The main techniques used in 2D animation are frames and tweens, a frame is basically a still image which is used in the animation process, and often the more frames you have the more smoothly your animation works, and in order to add animation to these images you need to add a tween between a group of images. To create such a thing people use Adobe Flash.

The requirements of the breif was to produce a 2D animated flash banner in which we could use on our one page website, the purpous of doing this was so that we understood how to go about creating a flash banner and so we had some experiance in this area. The expectations of the users I would think is probably quite high, as technology has changed a lot over the years and we are now able to do a range of different things that we once couldn't do, and because of this the expectations of the people who use this software have also changed, we expect a lot from said programmes, I am a first time user of Adobe Flash so when creating my banner I didn't set my expectations too high, so I opted for a straightforward, simple animation when I created my flash banner. I also made sure that when I had created it that it was with the same style guidelines as my one page website, to ensure that it fitted well with my overall layout, and so that it was an overall success. I saved my animation as a flash file, but you aslo have to export it as a movie, to allow you to use it one your one page website, if for any reason I wanted to make some changes to my banner, I would edit the flash file and then I would export it over the previously saved file. Another thing you have to ensure you do when creating your flash animation is to name your layers, to ensure that you know what is what and this will in turn make the creating process for your flash banner a lot easier. Also make sure you save all of your work with appropriate names and in suitable folders so that everything is stored in one place.