Like a pandemic, the movie industry has set a wave for movie watchers by changing the trend from camera tricks to animated images. With the evolution of animated cartoons comes a much greater trend of technology which is now prominent not only in films and advertisements but also in humungous amounts of applications in the web. Such technological advantage was made possible by animation tools that are well known by artists and users alike. The animation softwares, albeit they have one general classification as an animation tool, differs in a lot of factors like it’s easy-to-understand graphical user interface and user’s icon familiarity. Taking for example Adobe Photoshop, an image editing tool, it has a window designed solely to animate images but one thing that makes it tedious to be used as such is that it uses a frame by frame basis in animating the images which would mean that the artist would not only create the images’ main action but also its betweeners to make it appear smoother. But with the rapid changes in technology, much better softwares are developed to address such time-consuming situations.
To name a few of these animating tools we have Synfig, Pencil, Creatoon, Swish and Adobe Flash. Among the aforementioned, Flash is much more prominent. Flash, regardless of its versions, can create numerous applications like games, advertisements, folios, computer-aided instructional materials and even websites. With the innovations of Flash CS5, users can now preview imported videos on the stage and while viewing the video, users can adjust its properties like changing the video’s skin or coordinates via the Properties panel. The video’s time is also displayed in the Properties panel and it allows the user to set ActionScript cue points while the video is playing. Another featured highlight of Flash CS5 is the Code Snippets. This feature would be of great help for animation enthusiasts who find action scripting a bit tedious. The Code Snippets panel contains snippets of code for common functionality like drag-and-drop, loading and unloading objects, event handlers, animation and video controls. Additional innovations are the new Text Layout Framework (TLF) which gives designers the ability to link text fields together and thus creating a threaded text, the new deco brushes which allow users to quickly draw and animate smoke, particles, lightning and fire. There are also new patterns which include skyscrapers, trees and flowers. There are also additional animation templates for rain, snow and other effects.
On the animation rack comes new software that would somehow level or perhaps outdate Flash – Adobe Edge. Edge is a motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to integrate animated content into their websites using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3. Though Edge is still on its embryonic stage, it is a promising tool. The core of Edge’s interactivity capability is the Actions. Actions are functions that can be added to handle a single event. The Actions editor uses a popup interface that lets you enter a JavaScript code for a function but like Flash, it has also a built in code snippet library that contains commonly used functions like go to, stop, hyperlink and others. The user could also add their own JavaScript code for flexibility purposes.
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