Making An Animation

[Arielcz]

I'm making a Mario animation for a class project where I've decided to parody Mario into a local corrupt politician jumping on civilians and taking their coins. I've got the background, I've made my sprites but there are somethings I'm not sure about:
1: How many frames does it take for the normal time to pass level 1 in Super Mario Bros. 1?
2: Where can I find good sounds and music for it?
3: How do I enlarge an image in the way you can using word where it grows exact with and height? Because with Flash I just end up stretching the image more on one dimension than the other

I'll post my other doubts as I work.

[Tyler_Legrand]

Number 1, I can't answer, because it depends on the frame rate.

Number 2, try Flashkit.com. And google for a site of video game music or something.

Number 3, hold shift when resizing.

[Axidos]

1. Do you mean level completion time? In which case I think it's 300 seconds. It may vary on some levels.
If you mean the frames per second the game runs at, I can't find this information anywhere. NTSC televisions have a refresh rate of 60 frames per second while PAL runs at 50, so it's probably some even division of either of those. 30 FPS? 15? Do trial and error and find something close. I doubt it needs to be perfect.


2. Sound effects took a bit of searching but I found them, more or less.
First, this flash contains a bunch of super mario sound effects, not all from SMB1, but it should do:
http://redruth.greenbean.org/~ben/4CR/smb_super_synth.swf

Save that flash (using right-click -> "save target as" on that link, then extract the sound effects using SWFExtract, included in SWFTools (http://www.swftools.org/). There's your sound files.


3. Hold SHIFT while using the free transform tool in order to, as it's technically called, maintain the aspect ratio. It's conventional for SHIFT to do this during resizing, so this will probably work in just about any other program as well.

[Arielcz]

Thank you, all off those were helpful, I'll post my other doubts as I work.

[Arielcz]

How do I rotate an image around an axis?
I know how to make a motion tween and make the image rotate around it's center, but how can I make a smooth tween of an image rotating around an axis? similar to a door swinging on its hinge.

[Tyler_Legrand]

Assuming your image is already a symbol:

First keyframe. Select image, transform tool. You'll notice a little white circle in the middle, as well as the white squares around the image. Drag the circle somewhere; the circle is the "hinge" of the image. It will affect scaling as well as rotating.

Now select a frame after the first key frame and make a second keyframe. Select image, transform tools. Assuming there was nothing between the first and second keyframes, the white circle should be in the same place as it was in the first keyframe. (If it's not, I am baffled.)

Rotate the image in the second keyframe; you'll see that it rotates around the white circle. Motion tween the action between the two key frames, and it'll obey the circle as it moves.

[Arielcz]

How do I select frames 1 through 4,785 to insert a song. No matter how much I stretch it I can't get past 100 frames. What I wanna do is make the animation around the song, so I need to add the song first. How do I do this?
Also, how do I make the same song run through all scenes?

[Spastic]

I'm not experienced with Flash but the norm is usually holding shift when trying to select more things without deselecting others.

[Arielcz]

yeah, but the little bar thingies wont go past 800 on small, when I put tiny I can't even read the numbers well.

[Axidos]

yeah, but the little bar thingies wont go past 800 on small, when I put tiny I can't even read the numbers well.

You don't need to do that for music. Just create a single keyframe somewhere and put the music on that. Preferably put the music on a new layer (called 'music' so you know what it's there for), just because it's a good idea to keep entirely different things on different layers. The music will keep playing even after the frame it's in ends.

If you want to be able to start/stop the music at any point (you may want to stop it once the animation's over, if it hasn't already finished), a different method using ActionScript is required. There's a good tutorial here on how to do it: How to Start, Stop and Loop a Sound Object (http://kennybellew.com/tutorial/how_to_start.htm).

That tutorial has a download link for all the flash files (in editable format) used in it. The link's in the grey title bar up at the top of the page. That author also has quite a few other sound-related tutorials (http://kennybellew.com/tutorial/).