Website Intro Done completely in Anime Studio Pro

LittleFenris · Post by **LittleFenris** » Sun Dec 17, 2006 12:24 am

http://www.littlefenris.com/GrapeSeed/Intro.html

This is a WIP intro for the redesign of a Bistro/Wine Bar. Everything you see was done in Anime Studio Pro. Flash was used so it was completely web friendly and so I can program and Enter button and all that fun stuff at the end of the animation.

The original .swf file straight out of ASPro was 561kb but with some creativity I got it down to around 282kb in Flash. Thats still a bit large just for an intro, but I didn't even want to attempt this straight in Flash (mostly because of the wine dripping down the screen). That was done quite easily with point animation in ASPro. I'm not sure how much more creative used of resources I can do in Flash to get the file size down more but we'll see. Every kb counts when you are showing something on the web.

ulrik · Post by **ulrik** » Sun Dec 17, 2006 12:40 am

Congratulations!! Well done

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Sun Dec 17, 2006 7:16 am

Nicely done. Nice logo + text as well.

artfx · Post by **artfx** » Sun Dec 17, 2006 8:48 am

That loaded really fast for me. Nice job.

So what kind of optimizations do you need to do in Flash? Do you have to remove excess points?

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Sun Dec 17, 2006 8:53 am

That surely looks hip.

I hope you can save your customer some bandwidth costs and their customers some time to wait. You can always include a skip intro button for those impatient visitors, although it almost always ruins the layout if you do. The best results for a skip button are often outside the animation.

LittleFenris · Post by **LittleFenris** » Sun Dec 17, 2006 6:10 pm

artfx wrote:So what kind of optimizations do you need to do in Flash? Do you have to remove excess points?

When I imported the .swf file into Flash from AS there were a lot of things off screen so I deleted anything from each frame that wasn't visible. Also if you notice the wine glass doesn't do anything except move up, so I made one version of the glass and keyframed it through the entire piece instead of having a new glass in every frame like AS exported. That did most of the optimizing since the glass is made up of a good 20+ shapes when exported from AS. I did the same thing with the grape cluster towards the end. Its the same cluster for the last 1/3 or so of the animation so I made one graphic and used it instead of having a new cluster in every frame. It would be way too tedious in something much longer than this was to do all this since you have to go frame by frame and delete things, but in the case of an intro it was worth the time.

I tried doing the animation straight in Flash at first but I couldn't get the Guide layers to work properly so I gave up since I knew it would be much easier to do it in AS anyways. Only reason I wanted to do it in Flash first was the file size would almost surely be much less than it is even now. I'd bet in the 80-100kb range vs the 282kb it is now.

Rasheed wrote:That surely looks hip.

I hope you can save your customer some bandwidth costs and their customers some time to wait. You can always include a skip intro button for those impatient visitors, although it almost always ruins the layout if you do. The best results for a skip button are often outside the animation.

In all honesty I told them I didn't think a Flash intro was a good idea from a user perspective but they wanted it and I wasn't going to argue the point since it makes me money but at least I was trying to give the client my honest opinion on Flash Intros.

To the point of the skip button, yes there will be one, also a more obvious "Enter" button at the end as well. I didn't do all that yet since this was just the first draft of the animation for client approval. Once its approved I'll add all the technical babble to the Flash piece.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:35 am

In all honesty I told them I didn't think a Flash intro was a good idea from a user perspective but they wanted it and I wasn't going to argue the point since it makes me money but at least I was trying to give the client my honest opinion on Flash Intros.

That's the kind of honesty I appreciate.

As for creating small files: I would've done only the animation of the wine in AS. Everything else I would have imported separately into Flash and animate it there, as symbols.