Book review: Animating with Flash MX

We don't often review books that deal with older versions of Flash, but when you're working with animation then things haven't changed much since the days of MX. The most recent new feature to excite animators was the introduction of video back in March 2002.It's a bit of a shame, but the grassroots audience have been a little neglected during Macromedia's drive to attract enterprise developers.

TITLE: Animating with Flash MX: Professional creative animation techniques
PUBLISHER: Focal Press
ISBN: 0-240-51905-1
PAGES: 433 colour
CD: Yes
AUTHOR: Alex Michael

There is good news on the horizon though. Mike Chambers (Macromedia's Developer Relations Product Manager) has hinted that with the next version of Flash, the design team is 'going back to our roots'. In the meantime, let's take a look at Focal Press' 'Animating with Flash MX: Professional creative animation techniques'.

The process of animation is a complex and multi-faceted subject, and computer animation is even more arcane. Alex Michael manages to tackle this myriad of esoteric skills with confidence and experience. The information is well presented, in full colour throughout, and comfortably reliable. In fact it's hard to believe the gulf of quality between this book and the other Focal Press book in our review, considering they are both by the same author.

The first few chapters deal with creating animation. After a quick survey of all the popular graphics packages we have a couple of chapters on animating in Flash and 3D animation in Poser. Following that there is a timeless chapter on walk cycles that could have been at home in any classic textbook on cell animation. The traditional skills are all well represented, with good chapters on storyboarding, typography, characterization and lip-sync.

Audio and video are covered extensively. There is practical advice on the joys of working with the world's largely incompatible video and TV standards, working with sound in Flash, and inserting Flash into Quicktime. Working with Flash video though, is noticeably absent.

There is an inevitable introduction to Actionscript, and a not-so-relevant chapter on components. There are some nice programmatical spot effects though - in fact, they seem to be same ones as in the other book. More complex Actionscript is covered in a chapter on games and another on dynamic animation featuring a fish tank. What is it about programmers and fishtanks?

The book kicks up a gear once we get into video formats and what TV will do to your picture. This is good solid information - hard won from years in the trenches. If you're considering developing Flash animation for TV then this stuff is worth the cover price alone. The quality is equally high when covering working with other mediums such as Pocket PC and Interactive TV.

There are a few references to dead or legacy technologies such as Generator, Ultradev and LiveMotion, so some of the technical stuff is beginning to showing its age. That said, the heart of the book is classic animation skills that were pioneered decades ago. Well worth picking up.
Focal Press

 

 

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