This is still a 'work in progress' (see comments below). The final file size is 826Kb.
This is designed as a guide for our new and prospective students, to help them become familiar with the campus and orientate themselves. Many of our students are the first in their family to go to university and they find the experience daunting. We also have many mature students; adults who never realised their potential earlier in life and who now decide to obtain a degree. Some come in directly to years 2 and 3 from further education colleges. Hopefully, this resource will help them all to feel 'at home' and integrate into university life more quickly. It could also be a useful information source for prospective students when choosing which universities to include on their application form.
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Macromedia Flash was used to create this movie, with Fireworks for resizing and transforming images. There is a preloader sequence, an introductory animation and an interactive map of the campus. The basic map was traced and scanned then converted to a GIF image. All except one of the photographs were taken by the author, with permission obtained from a colleague for the photograph looking down towards the front of the Lindsay Stewart lecture theatre. All the other images were created in Flash. The music is an original composition by Nigel Davison (the author's son-in-law), also performed by him, used with his permission.
After the preloader has played, the opening sequence (scene 2) uses motion tweening to sequentially place 8 small images of the campus, with an image of the map in the centre. Clicking on the small image of the map in the centre takes the user to scene 3, the interactive map. The music continues, but can be turned off using the button top right. I did not have time to create a button to turn it on again,or to figure out how to do this when the music layer is in a different scene.
The user has to mouse around to find the links; this is deliberate and simulates exploring the building in real life. There are 12 different areas to visit, each link leading to a photographic image. Within some of these areas there are further links eg to a different view of the space, to an external website (opens in a new window), to an interactive library tutorial (under development) and some Easter eggs (try mousing over the images of the receptionists). There is also a credits page. Every page has a link leading back to the previous page and/or the map, thus assisting user orientation.
It was a hard task, but the end product looks exactly as I intended it. Not too polished, user friendly and interesting with a touch of humour (I hope!).
I created scene 3 (the map) first and got in a bit of a panic when the exported movie was over 900Kb - without the opening animation, preloader or music! I then re-optimised all the images to quite small jpg files (20 - 30Kb each), however the picture quality suffered a lot as a result. I should have learned the lesson from the music box activity: that you can use Flash to do the compression. If rebuilding this movie I would use higher quality images and adjust the Flash compression on export to get the correct file size - in the end I had 150Kb spare which I could have used for better image quality.
The music was also worrying, as the file Nigel gave me was 1.6Mb, with a bit rate of 128bps. At first I used only half the track and changed the bit rate to 32bps (MP3 file size 171Kb) but it made little difference to the size of the Flash file when exported, so I went back and used all the music (changed again to 32bps, MP3 file 355Kb). The final Flash file size was still OK and the music is so good, I think it's better to have the whole composition included.
I used Camtasia to record a screenshot of accessing the Napier library with a voice over. This was saved as a swf file and imported into the Flash library. Ideally, this page would have a series of short clips for the user to select from: eg logging on, doing a search, retrieving a journal article etc. It's something our students find difficult to do and would be a good addition later on. At the moment the animated screenshot is there as an example and the audio track isn't included.
I converted the images to symbols so that their use in the opening animation would not take up any more space. The 'Back to Map' button was also a standard library symbol. I learned a lot about using the Flash library and organising assets into folders.
An alternative audio file and written transcript, describing the tour of Craiglockhart campus, could be made available for users with visual and auditory difficulties.
Short library tutorial movies could be included as suggested above. The sound could be added as a separate swf movie, independent of the scenes and layers. Image quality could be improved and more images added. There is much more to learn about using Flash and Actionscript and I can see great potential for other uses of this programme.
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Davison, N (2006) Guitar with Keys, original music composed and performed by him, reporoduced with permission.
Shedlock A (2004) Napier University, image of Lindsay Stewart lecture theatre, used with permission.