I was having a hard time getting some ideas going for my animation. It wasn’t that I wasn’t coming up with any; it was just that the ideas I was coming up with were way too complicated to carry out with my very limited skill-set in Macromedia Flash. I later decided to draw on personal experience to help in imagining the events I had to animate and my skill-set naturally evolved as the process went on.
When I was a young man, I remember a trip to the apple farm with my family. We picked apples most of the day and I was feeling tired. So while the rest of the family continued collecting their apples, I decided to relax under the shade of one of the many trees. I remember spotting an apple on the ground and figured it was all right to eat one while I rested. I sank my teeth in and looked at the crater I had left in the apple’s red surface. Within the pulpy white crater I saw movement. Sure enough there was a little green worm occupying the apple. It scared me so much I threw the apple on the ground and ran away. The rest of the day I was afraid the worm had attached itself to me, waiting for the opportune moment to exact his revenge.
In order to carry the animation out, I basically told this story in picture form on two sheets of paper. One or two sentences from the above paragraph equaled one picture of my storyboard. And each section of my storyboard equaled one scene or shot. Each shot was just a combination of very simple movements. For example, an arm moves at the same e time as a character’s head, or an apple falls and rests on the characters lap.
In order to carry out what I had planned, I only needed a few tools. First some of my own hand sketches. I could use a vector imaging program to trace the sketches, I prefer Macromedia Freehand. I then used Macromedia Flash MX to give these sketches motion. The result was a combination of scenes that used tweening and some frame-by-frame techniques to tell an animated story.