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Description
Turn on the volume, there is a soundtrack!

For best viewing, let the video load to 100% and then wait
10 seconds before pressing Play, OR download the SWF file, save
it, and play it from your Flash Player. That's probably the best option!

EDIT: Fixed the font problem everyone was having. Much better!

NO CRITIQUE DESIRED, THANK YOU!

- - -

Here we have the monster that I worked on for two months straight,
the one I keep talking about but never post, lol. After some minor
tweaking, I managed to get it just the way I wanted it. So without
further adieu, I present my first serious Flash project: BLOODLUST.

I started by listening to the song over and over and over again,
trying to come up with a storyline. I knew I wanted it to be about
werewolves, but I was having a hard time with the sequence of
events. After hours of sketching, I came up with thumbnails and
timestamps that served as a rough model for what I wanted to
create. I then went into Illustrator and refined all of my sketches.

Hardly anything was drawn in Flash itself, I find Illustrator to be
a better drawing tool anyway. I laid down base gradients and a few
simple effects (glows are sort of a handicap of mine) before importing
all of the vectors into Flash, where I gave it color and a bit of texture.
To save time and file size, all of the scenes are grayscale; there is
a simple blue rectangle set to overlay on top of everything to give
it that cold, nighttime feel. The red accents are the only thing that
I went in and did individually. Gotta love all the bloody goodness.

Animating everything was a pain in the butt. I had never really
worked with Flash before and this was just the beginner class,
so on top of not really knowing what I was doing I had this insanely
complicated idea that I wanted to execute. You know me... Originally,
I wanted to pan back and forth in some scenes and zoom in on
others, but my vectors were too complex for that sort of motion.
Flash quit on me hundreds of times during the course of this project,
sometimes making me lose a lot of work. It was also really slow.
Most of the reason behind me taking so long to post this is because
I was too furious with Flash to open it. XD Literally! I was that upset
with the program. I think we're back to being friends now, though.

My favorite part of the animation is the gun firing, that was by
far what I spent the most time on. The door handle and the moon
are probably tied for second, with the end blood splatter coming in
third. I think what impressed me most about the gun was the
smoke after the bullet exits the chamber; I didn't think I could
get that to look right but it ended up being really cool. A lot of
photographs were used as references for the actual backgrounds,
especially where perspective is concerned since I fail at that. And
there were also references for the gun, hands, lamp, etc. but my
drawings look so incredibly different that I didn't feel the need
to cite any of them officially. I did cite the textures and splatters
used, which I didn't modify at all so those belong to their creators.

One of my greatest struggles was the falling rain and you would
not believe what it came down to. Instead of drawing a billion
raindrops and animating all of them individually, I drew out one
frame of static raindrops (making sure to scatter them naturally)
and then flipped the resulting work horizontally and vertically so
that I could get four different 'patterns' of rain from the same image.
What you see in the animation is me flipping through those four
instances of rain really fast, which gives the illusion that it's falling!

This animation also has a fair bit of code, which I'm not great with.
Hence those last stressful nights before the due date where I wanted
to rip my project apart. Because of this, you guys don't get a pause
button. Pretty much all of my work was done in separate movie
clips, which function apart from the timeline, so a pause button
would never fully stop all motion. Ah well, I'll get it right next time.

Because I worked over 100 hours on this thing, I want absolutely
no critique. I don't even want suggestions. Revisiting this thing
is something I want to avoid, and it's my first real Flash attempt
anyway. I'm certainly not a pro and I'm not an animator either.
This is just a hobby for now. It's been a fantasy of mine to create
an animation to music and now that I've done it, I'm satisfied.
The results may not be stellar, but I gave it my best shot. A lot
of blood, sweat, and tears went into this... so I just want to relish
it for awhile. It's not perfect by any means, but I still love it.

Anyway, that's probably enough rambling for now. If I think of
anything else, I'll be sure to add it. Oh, and please don't hesitate
to ask me how I achieved certain things---I'd love to share what
I learned! Most of it is fairly simple, too. You most likely won't see
any Flash animations from me in a long time, so I hope this beast
will tide you over. Let me know if it's everything you'd hoped it'd be!

Created in Illustrator & Flash CS4 from June-July 2010.

Fonts Used + Download Link

Base 02: www.dafont.com/search.php?psiz…
Eras Demi ITC: www.windowfonts.com/fonts/eras…

Description
Turn on the volume, there is a soundtrack!

For best viewing, let the video load to 100% and then wait
10 seconds before pressing Play, OR download the SWF file, save
it, and play it from your Flash Player. That's probably the best option!

EDIT: Fixed the font problem everyone was having. Much better!

NO CRITIQUE DESIRED, THANK YOU!

- - -

Here we have the monster that I worked on for two months straight,
the one I keep talking about but never post, lol. After some minor
tweaking, I managed to get it just the way I wanted it. So without
further adieu, I present my first serious Flash project: BLOODLUST.

I started by listening to the song over and over and over again,
trying to come up with a storyline. I knew I wanted it to be about
werewolves, but I was having a hard time with the sequence of
events. After hours of sketching, I came up with thumbnails and
timestamps that served as a rough model for what I wanted to
create. I then went into Illustrator and refined all of my sketches.

Hardly anything was drawn in Flash itself, I find Illustrator to be
a better drawing tool anyway. I laid down base gradients and a few
simple effects (glows are sort of a handicap of mine) before importing
all of the vectors into Flash, where I gave it color and a bit of texture.
To save time and file size, all of the scenes are grayscale; there is
a simple blue rectangle set to overlay on top of everything to give
it that cold, nighttime feel. The red accents are the only thing that
I went in and did individually. Gotta love all the bloody goodness.

Animating everything was a pain in the butt. I had never really
worked with Flash before and this was just the beginner class,
so on top of not really knowing what I was doing I had this insanely
complicated idea that I wanted to execute. You know me... Originally,
I wanted to pan back and forth in some scenes and zoom in on
others, but my vectors were too complex for that sort of motion.
Flash quit on me hundreds of times during the course of this project,
sometimes making me lose a lot of work. It was also really slow.
Most of the reason behind me taking so long to post this is because
I was too furious with Flash to open it. XD Literally! I was that upset
with the program. I think we're back to being friends now, though.

My favorite part of the animation is the gun firing, that was by
far what I spent the most time on. The door handle and the moon
are probably tied for second, with the end blood splatter coming in
third. I think what impressed me most about the gun was the
smoke after the bullet exits the chamber; I didn't think I could
get that to look right but it ended up being really cool. A lot of
photographs were used as references for the actual backgrounds,
especially where perspective is concerned since I fail at that. And
there were also references for the gun, hands, lamp, etc. but my
drawings look so incredibly different that I didn't feel the need
to cite any of them officially. I did cite the textures and splatters
used, which I didn't modify at all so those belong to their creators.

One of my greatest struggles was the falling rain and you would
not believe what it came down to. Instead of drawing a billion
raindrops and animating all of them individually, I drew out one
frame of static raindrops (making sure to scatter them naturally)
and then flipped the resulting work horizontally and vertically so
that I could get four different 'patterns' of rain from the same image.
What you see in the animation is me flipping through those four
instances of rain really fast, which gives the illusion that it's falling!

This animation also has a fair bit of code, which I'm not great with.
Hence those last stressful nights before the due date where I wanted
to rip my project apart. Because of this, you guys don't get a pause
button. Pretty much all of my work was done in separate movie
clips, which function apart from the timeline, so a pause button
would never fully stop all motion. Ah well, I'll get it right next time.

Because I worked over 100 hours on this thing, I want absolutely
no critique. I don't even want suggestions. Revisiting this thing
is something I want to avoid, and it's my first real Flash attempt
anyway. I'm certainly not a pro and I'm not an animator either.
This is just a hobby for now. It's been a fantasy of mine to create
an animation to music and now that I've done it, I'm satisfied.
The results may not be stellar, but I gave it my best shot. A lot
of blood, sweat, and tears went into this... so I just want to relish
it for awhile. It's not perfect by any means, but I still love it.

Anyway, that's probably enough rambling for now. If I think of
anything else, I'll be sure to add it. Oh, and please don't hesitate
to ask me how I achieved certain things---I'd love to share what
I learned! Most of it is fairly simple, too. You most likely won't see
any Flash animations from me in a long time, so I hope this beast
will tide you over. Let me know if it's everything you'd hoped it'd be!

Created in Illustrator & Flash CS4 from June-July 2010.

Fonts Used + Download Link

Base 02: www.dafont.com/search.php?psiz…
Eras Demi ITC: www.windowfonts.com/fonts/eras…