2016-06-13 8:09:09 ¶ ●

## how do you guys make your flashes?

Momo here!

I use Flash CS3. If you have a little animation and programming experience, it’s very easy to learn. I’d never touched the program before I worked on the prologue flashes. So the prologue served another purpose in addition to being a little silly and giving the artists a buffer window; it allowed me to test out and develop things like working in flash, making panels, hosting content, and using the website, so by the time we got to the Important stuff, I knew what I was doing and could make things quickly.

Relatively quickly, anyway. [S]Start still took me an entire week of crunching, even though most of that was drawing. And most of the day was going to my 9-5! I was exhausted at the end of that.

But that’s not what you asked. I usually start with an animatic, if it’s a long process that requires timing. Then I put in the images I need on the screen during the keys that I need them, in the right size and starting location. When the timing of everything feels right, then I animate them and apply the motion tweens. Sometimes I need to do fancy things with layer masks, like the load circle in [S]Start, and that takes a lot longer.

While not a lot of people are using flash in this way anymore, it was huge in its day, so there’s a plethora of tutorials available to find and use for whatever it is you want to do. Actionscript is fun and .swfs can do a lot of things if you’re creative. A lot of folks missed that this panel was interactive, and it was fun to discover how to change the “panel text” based on what objects you clicked. I’m hoping I can come up with new things later on, too. Maybe even cool secret things.

As for hosting, we use Dropbox, which is one of the only websites that allows hosting and hotlinking of .swfs that I can find. For now it’s doing the job just fine, and we have a plan if that ever changes.

That’s not a very in-depth tutorial, so some day I’ll sit down and make something more detailed, as unqualified as I am. But I hope that at least gave a glimpse into the process.