Well, the final assignment is here! It seems like this class went by fast, but then I ended up doing it in two weeks, so it probably did. I have two more classes starting in the next two weeks, so I needed to get a move on.
I opened up my logo file from last week, and decided to use a number of different techniques I learned for animation. I set the movie for 24 f.p.s. for smoother quality. I began with the initial "A" in Ahuka, and decided to have it move from below, while growing and rotating. I ran into a problem until I discovered that there was no way to move the object in the first frame while keeping the object in its original position in the last frame. So I had to move the object in frame one, then move it back again in the last frame ( frame 75, giving me a 3 second animation). The other thing I had to remember was to convert these things to symbols.
For the "A", I moved it down and to the right, roughly centered under the logo. I then selected a scale transformation to make it 1% of its original size. I then added three rotations.
Then for the rest of the word, the "huka", I used an alpha tweening explained in the Hotwired tutorial. Even though this really is a color transformation, you use the "motion" tweening setting to make this work. I set it in frame one to 0% alpha.
These were pretty easy. I thought I would try something a little trickier using the arcs on either side of that figure. I copied each of those arcs, created two new layers, and then for each of the new layers I created a guide layer. I pasted the arcs in place, one to each of the guide layers. Now I needed something to animate along those guide paths. I created a "star" in Fireworks, using its greater capabilities for this shape. I exported the eight-pointed star as a GIF, which I then imported. I set the star to travel from end to the other of the arc, and then back. At frame 1 and frame 75, I set the size to 10%, and at frame 37 I increased the brightness 100%.
Of course, the totality of it looks like one of those awful Flash animations where everything on the page moves, but since I was doing it for practice, that wasn't a concern. Here is the final product of all that tweaking.