Large Flash Project Design

Section 1: Project Goals

The proposed project will utilize the tools within the flash environment to create an interactive art gallery that displays some of my photography and artwork. The final site will enable the user to experience different kinds of photographs (i.e. nature, people, abstractions, etc.) by choosing his/her own paths.

First, the user will be welcomed to the site with a short introduction movie. Next, the user will be presented with a series of questions pertaining to an imaginative story. Based on the response to these questions, the user will be shown various examples of my photography. For example, the user may choose to follow a path pertaining to a tree. When this selection is made, a picture of a tree or forest will be displayed, and the user will be able to choose another path in a similar manner. This will hopefully lead to a more interactive way of displaying a portfolio on the internet.

Section 2: Story board Design

The flash movie that I will be creating will include multiple layers of content. First, I will need to create a layer for the initial text that will welcome the visitor to the site. This will most likely include letters that will be converted into symbols to facilitate animation. Once this is completed, I will use a separate layer to include text that provides the user with the main storyline to follow. This storyline will consist of the possible choices and directions available for the user to follow. On separate layers, I will include individual pictures that will integrate into the storyline. Possibly, I will be able to dynamically load pictures and content from external files into a single layer, thus facilitating the animations and creating a smaller file size. If this is not possible, I will place all pictures on separate layers of the flash file. When the user chooses a particular path of the story to follow, the frame of the picture will load and will be displayed for the user. The user will be carried throughout the site in this manner.

Section 3: Skill Acquisition Goals

I have used flash minimally in the past, but I am not very comfortable in creating entire projects in the flash environment. Through working on this project, I hope to gain an adequate level of comfort with flash so that I may continue to use it as a development tool. Furthermore, My knowledge of actionscript is extremely limited. Because of the immense capabilities of the coding environment in flash, I would like to be able to script my own movies so that I am able to achieve a greater sense of control over my designs. Using actionscript, I would also like to be able to import data from external sources such as databases or lists, so that elements (such as the pictures in my gallery) can be retrieved based on user input.

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