INTRODUCTION

After having bought one of the nifty new Casio Wristcam watches, I wanted to make a little image gallery to house all the photos I had taken but something a little different and more interactive than a typical photo gallery.
Using Flash, I came upon the idea of housing the images in a grid structure and using rollovers to cycle through other images. This way I could show more images within the same space.

STEP 1

Without needing to sketch or mock up concepts, I dove right into Flash. Although Flash 5 was at my disposal at the time, I opted to make this in Flash 4, since I was more proficient at it, and because I hate working with stupid Flash 5 quirks like the inability to onion-skin and move multiple key frames. I used a 3X3 grid because resolution of the Wristcam images being 200X200 determined that 3X3 would accomodate 800X600 monitor sizes, plus it was more feng shui than a 4X4 or a 5X5 grid.

STEP 2

Next came the creation of the rollovers. Basically what I did was create nine movie clips each containing the images in various order. I then made invisible buttons and placed them on the stage over the movie clips telling them to play on rollover and to stop on roll out.

I then stole a small sample from audio ingenues Autechre for the rollover sound.

CONCLUSION / MORAL OF STORY

Rather than bog the experience down with unnecessary design conventions and useless eye candy, I opted for something simple, but in the end effective at it's purpose, I think.

Other interesting things I learned from this project was that Flash treats black and white images as it does colour, so you don't save any filesize. Stupid, I know...

Another weird anomaly I'm sure others encounter in Flash is the weird pixel shift when alpha tweening images. Someone emailed me saying the way to fix this is to tween to 99% rather than to 100%. Although this fixed the problem of the shift, it brought up another problem of playback speed - since the movie clips had to process the images at 99% alpha, it tended to slow down distinguishably. In the end, I decided I could live with the pixel shift, because I didn't want to sacrifice the speed at which the movie played.

So there you go kids. Not a complicated Flash movie at all, and to prove it DIK and FameWhore would like to offer a download of it for learning purposes.

Download Flash File
--

Mac (1.2Mb)             PC (1mb)

- Famewhore