Common Mistake

Just finished reviewing Assignment 1. Some common mistakes or "not so good techniques" found in students' works are as follows:

1) Did not use fading / blending / tweening tools or techniques in Director, but use of cell or frame by frame animation to get those kind of effects, end up your cast library has lots of images in sequences. This has resulted a big file size for your Director movie.
If the kind of effect that you want is able to be achieved by using fading behavior or blending approach, then use these approaches. SEPARATE the background image with the graphic element (such as the kite, the little boy/charactor, the arrow, etc), so that you can apply effect on the graphics elements.

2) Suitable sounds should be added in your entry movie. A movie without sound or bg music is handicap, and not nice to view.

3) At the end of each movie, should have put a script to hold the last scene. Remember: go to the frame, or put a button to replay.

4) Broken link - font not found, avi / mov not found, Flash Xtra not found -- these kind of technical error should be avoided. Check your movie before you submit your final project. By right, font media can be inserted, pls use "true type" font so that is is well supported in Director and window environment. Also, if you have used avi or mov digital movie, pls provide the movie at the appropriate folder. If you have used Flash file, make sure the Xtra plugin for Flash is inserted into your movie.

5) oh, DO NOT create your movie dimension in 320X240 (pixel), you have very good graphics but the stage size is only 320 X 240. The ideal is 800X600. 1024 X 768 is accepted too.

6) Again, i know many of you can create very good graphics, either through camera or illustration program. If your create your director movie dimension is 640 X 480, but most of your images (imported to your cast window)are 1024X768, I would think that you are wasting the resources, creating a big size director movie, but the stage is just 640X480. What is recommended is to decide on the stage size, and whatever images (media files) need to be created to suit the stage dimension. (Exceptional case: if you need to create a ZOOM in ZOOM out program, then you need to consider that your image is good enough.. such as to maintain its big dimension in order to see the details when ZOOM in).

That's all for now.