The past few classes we have been making a flash banner to advertise anything of our choice. I chose to advertise McDonalds even though McDonalds has many people who visit their restaurant each day I thought it would be a good idea. The audience I am sending this advertisement to is mostly anyone who is looking for a fast food restaurant. I think that the two pictures on my flash banner make me have a good feeling and I would consider going to McDonalds to eat. I intended for the purpose of my advertisement to show that McDonalds is a very welcoming place and is kid oriented. The reason I say it is kid oriented is because most kids love Ronald McDonald, enjoy the happy meal, and even playing in the Play Place that some of their restaurants have.
I got the idea of my flash ad banner from this website. I followed the tutorial given on the website to make sure my animation would work correctly. There were a few minor changes I made because of the version on my computer.
We were asked to edit the pictures we chose to use in Photoshop, using the previous knowledge of the program. Some of the tools I used in Photoshop were the crop tool, the lasso tool, hue and saturation, brightness, and shadows/ highlights. I had to crop the two pictures because they were either larger than needed or had a lot going on in the photo. Then I used the lasso tool to highlight a certain area in the picture. After I lassoed that area I then used the hue and saturation to make the colors stand out more. The shadow/highlights tool was used to add more of a shadow to the McDonalds logo. Once we edited our pictures in Photoshop we then put together our flash animation banner. The tools that I used in Flash to make my banner were the resize tool, alignment, convert to symbol, blur, insert a motion tween, and then insert a key frame. I had to resize the stage background so it would be the correct size for the animation. Then once the pictures were imported to the stage I had to make sure they were aligned correctly to the stage so I made a few adjustments on the “align” tab. To make changes to the picture I needed to convert it to a symbol and make it a movie clip so it would move when needed. Another tool I used was the blur tool to make the picture look blurry in the beginning. A motion tween was inserted as well as a key frame. Both the key frame and motion tween made it possible for the images to move. These multiple tools were needed to complete the entire task if I did not use one of the tools it would not have worked properly.
Even though this project took us a little longer to complete and for us to learn, it was well worth it. This learning experience may not be used by everyone in the future, but some people may. Flash can be used to make many different animations; the one that we were using in particular, was for an advertisement.
** I do not take credit for any of the pictures in this ad. All rights go to their original owner.
