Unlike most, my animation isn't based of one of the Flash Fictions that I wrote, it was actually a story that I came up with just for fun. The characters were originally based off 18th century monopolists that I had learned about in my USHAP class, and the idea of the board game was originated from the board game monopoly, which I thought of through the word monopolist. Originally, the story was based off the play on words, "A monopoly on monopoly", implying that the character had a monopoly on board games.
Actually producing the animation was one of the most difficult things I've had to do at Freestyle, because it combined skills I learned in Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash. To create the animation we had to draw the characters, scene backgrounds, and props in Illustrator, and later import them into Flash to animate. In order to animate the drawings, we had to convert them to symbols and make them into motion tweens, which allows the drawings to move across the screen in a preprogrammed manner, as well as matching up the sounds with the motion tweens.
The animation process has taught me plenty of skills, along with refining other skills that I learned througout the first semester. First off, I learned a completely new program, Adobe Flash, and learned how to import items, color them, create them into symbols and tweens, along with how to manuever through the timeline and utilize the frames. I also learned how to use the brush tool in Illustrator, which improved by drawing ability by ten fold. The final thing the animation process taught me was how to patiently work past problems that seem disastrous, but with patience and perserverence they can be solved rather simply.