ADS4: Nesting Timline Animations

Advanced Digital Studio 4 CCAC [ design + media ] FALL 2002

Nesting Timelines & Looping Animations

Assignment:
Create a movie that is composed of multiple, nested, asynchronous, animated timelines.
Due: Monday, October 21

Parameters:
The nesting of TWEENED Timelines should be at least three levels deep.
You should also use multiple Tweens in the same Symbol.
Does not have to be representational, but this may help you to conceive and execute it.
Create all of the elements of your movie with Flash's drawing tools.

Concepts:
The action of independent parts:
By composing the whole out of Instances with their own timelines, we can give a degree of independence to the motion of the parts.
Simple nonlinear appearance:
When you use multiple looping timelines with different numbers of frames, they parts are not clearly synchronized. In fact, the animation will repeat, but it may take so long to get back to the initial state that the identity is not apparent.
Minimize size; Maximize effects:
Reuse Symbols as much as possible. One Symbol can take on many appearances. Example: A Instance of a Symbol that consists of a simple square shape can be scaled, colored, and rotated once it is placed in the timeline of another Symbol.
Nesting and Inheritance:
Symbol inside a Symbol inside a Symbol ... Tween within Tween within Tween ... A Tween applied to the outermost container will also affect the elements it contains; the effects are inherited. Example, if you have a set of nested dolls and you throw the biggest one, the ones inside go flying with it, their positions remain the same relative to the biggest doll.

You can already see where the language is going. This kind of relationship is called Parent/Child; changes applied to parents are inherited by children. You can also see where the metaphor begins to fail; for most of a normal lifetime, a child does not live inside of its parent; arguably, children require TWO parents.

HELP: Basic Timeline Interface

ADS4