ANIMATION & INTERACTION
The definition of the term animation is - ‘a rapid display of a sequence of individual 2D images in order to produce the illusion of movement’. The obvious example of this is the cartoon – where many thousands of images are created and displayed in rapid succession - as in flipping over pages in a book. The creation of even the simplest animation is a very time consuming exercise, hence the need for specialist software to speed up and automate this process.Flash was developed not only to speed up standard animation, but also to allow users to interact with the animations themselves. Just creating a simple one could take weeks, maybe months, but with Flash, that (and more) can be done at the push of a button, but as with all software packages there is a learning curve and Flash is no exception. It takes time and patience to master the techniques involved.
In order to allow interaction with the Flash modules/cartoons/movies (all are accepted phrases), some difficult and extensive programming is required which is beyond the means of the casual user. The Java applet is the most famous means of achieving this, but it is not easy to use and can be unstable. Hence Flash has have made life easier by developing the most common ones in use and incorporating them into it’s framework. Consequently, the only skills required now are finding out where they are and how to use them. This is sometimes not as easy as you might think - some obscure utilities/effects can often be buried away in a product, only to be discovered after hours of searching!!