Editing and Complications

Editing was a long slow process with many mistakes, mainly software and file type issues.
I started editing the animation in after effects but since it was primarily a stop motion of digital assets, after effects wasn't suited to my projects needs, this was due to problems with importing all folders in order and in the right hierarchy, animating the smiley tools in separate layers, and being unable to animate the cursor image without the layer either being invisible or blanking out the rest of the screen.

In the end i decided this project was better suited to be animated in flash. Importing and arranging the screens was the first step, however the timing constantly needed edited once i started animating the smileys on a new layer.

I had to create separate photoshop files for the smileys and cursor so i could animate them, originally i was going to use the Jpeg files when i was animating in after effects however now i've decided to use flash, each smiley had to be separated into individual photoshop files with blank backgrounds and imported one by one.
I attempted to animate them using motion tweens but it was blurred for too long or not at all, once the motion tween idea didn't work i tried animating them keyframe by keyframe, however the airbrush highlights were different each time, giving the smiley animations a jumpy appearance, which was just unappealing, so i settled on animating them in the same style as the website screens.

The cursor on the other hand was unusual to animate, i used a motion tween however because it was dealing with alot of movements in the one tween on a small scale, the motion guide lines kept going way off or unnecessarily arching, causing a very unnatural movement for the cursor, this took alot of tweaking and positioning using the arrow keys rather than a mouse.

Once the animation was completed i saved it out as an avi and as a gif file.
In the tutors tutorial when making an app version of this website, he included a high resolution image of an iphone as a boarder, i liked this finishing touch that gave the whole project a more professional final outcome, so i decided to include a desktop version, i edited out the background and screen of the stock image i gathered online however when i brought it into flash to include it, the animation doesn't scroll down the screen, meaning the whole projects animation would have to be redone, at this point in the project the deadline was approaching so i decided it was too time consuming for its purpose, instead i used an ipad to show the tablet version of the website.

Unlike the desktop version i had alot of trouble including the ipad boarder, it required a different canvas size and re-positioning the whole animation. re-positioning the animation frame by frame would've was time consuming and unwise at this point of the project, so instead i used the avi file on a new flash document, however this had to be first converted into an flv file. I used the encoder to do so but it mustn't have converted the whole file, since out of an approx 30 second animation, i only had 7 seconds, the encoder wasn't working properly and it was very time consuming trying to fix it then looking for an alternative option, especially considering the large file size.
This was probably the most unanticipated and biggest problem i encountered during this entire live project.

When i finally converted the avi to flv and imported it into the stage, i was able to position the ipad boarder and save it out, ready to be uploaded online. Due to the amount of assets and the fact i used adobe software to animate and edit the prototype it was difficult to compress the file for uploading without loosing resolution or timing.