Week 1 - Animated GIF
I haven't built a GIF in years.
I had some initial problems with the canvas size, but I managed to get my animated GIF done. I used the duplicate layers feature to make identical copies of the black bars and text above and below. Also used Rulers to get perfect alignment of the black bars.
I really liked the Timeline feature. I can see this being a fun addicting thing for the classroom. Looking forward to exploring Animate CC.
Week 2 - Adobe Animate
Well that was pretty hard. I had completely forgotten how to use Flash. It's been way too long.
I actually had to listen to the lecture twice to get a lot of it right.
I think I'm still a little lost between inserting a Frame and a Keyframe. I know Keyframe is for animation between frames, but inserting frame at the 90 frame mark to expand all content still confuses me a bit. Beside that, everything else was pretty straight-forward. It was nice to experience the Flash interface, even under the Animate name.
I feel like there are a lot of little steps that you have to be really careful with. That in itself makes me a little nervous using the app, but I think it'll just take some more trial and error. I'm curious to try some animations on my own now. Maybe some Illustrator illustrations I have.
Final Reflections
This course seemed intimidating at first, but I really enjoyed the smooth relationship between Photoshop and Animate. I also like how you can export as Video in Animate. I was able to export my almost 3MB animation as an MOV and subsequently as an MP4 with Media Encoder. Wish this course was 4 to 5 weeks. I feel like Animate merits a little bit more attention. I'm definitely very keen to explore it further.