Similar sites

When looking at animating as a whole, there are a lot of resources out there. Animation has moved from a paper based art form to a computer based art form. Despite this major shift, there are still blogs out there for traditional animation such as traditionalanimation.com -->

Image courtesy of Flash FX Animation

As I have focused on the use of Adobe Flash Animator, I will be looking at an example of a similar blog which has grown since 2008 to the point where it is selling products and has a large following. Flashfx is a website for animators to showcase their stuff and to even sell some of it as packages which can be used in other animations. They have organized the site around the ability to post 2D Flash animation effects and to allow others to purchase those files. This website is an example of a crowd sourced website as no one individual has a monopoly over the content of the website. Almost any animator can upload their content to the website and the views and downloads and purchases that the animator gets is due to the interest from the internet community of Flash animators who use the site. This model reminds me of Ferdinand Tonnies concept of Gesellschaft (Quan-Haase, A. (2013). Community in the network society. in Technology and society: Social networks, power and inequality (pp. 147-165)). Gesellschaft is the idea that individuals will form a loose knit community around a common goal with individually self-serving motivations. The individuals in this case are the animators who want to showcase their work and be able to sell it. If they create a repository of animation effects that others can access and purchase, then they will get more traffic and more purchases by pooling their resources and working together rather than alone.

I do not have anything like this in mind for the scope of my website. Instead of trying to make money, I am trying to learn how to use Flash animator to teach animation in a high school setting. At present, my class has used it to make short animated videos and as of November 23rd, they have used it to make a very simple video game.

At present, your character (the green pentagon) can move around the stage using the arrow keys, can jump onto each of the different 'ground' pieces, and can fall. Should the character fall off of the blocks, it will be reset to its beginning point. The next step is to take this idea and add different levels. I will be doing this next week by following Kieth Frislid's video which you can see below.

November 27th.
       I just spent an entire class getting my students to program 2 buttons.
       Two words: Herding Cats