Friday, 4 July 2014

Masking and morphing in Flash

There is a piece in the captain’s log when the captain first catches a glimpse of Dracula, “I saw it, HIM”. This is a pretty scary encounter and the words alone make you question what form Dracula was in. When the ship first docks at Whitby harbour, the only thing that is seen leaving the ship was a beast in the form of a dog. I decided to morph the words “it” and “him” into a dog. Because Dracula is more famous for bats I then morphed the dog into a bat that flies directly at the camera/viewer. Shape tweening wasn’t working as well as I wanted it to, even when using shape hints. I think if I’d morphed one letter it may have worked better but morphing words, with open spaces in ‘e’ and ‘a’ caused a lot of problems, so I morphed the ‘HIM’ into a dog using frame by frame animation and then masked the bat so it appeared on top of the dog and as the bat flies towards the screen the dog faded out.

I was also concerned still about canvas sizing and didn’t want to go too far without having that sorted, I emailed my supervisor and asked for some suggestions about size and he advised on 16:9 ration to get that cinematic effect.

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