May
From the Archives | Met Match Movie
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In the bad old days of 2004, there was one animation tool that dominated: Macromedia Flash. As a part of my senior year program, I wanted to take up animation, and Flash was the way to do it. The final for my class was to produce a two-minute video of any subject matter. It just needed audio, transitions, and illustrate your basic understanding of animation.
I chose a song that I thought was brief, told a very good story, and had a lot of energy. Stevie Wonder’s “You Met Your Match” was perfect. I wanted the song to come to life, like a handwritten love letter. I wrote each word individually on transparent paper and scanned them in to digitize. I was so proud of this piece, and it impressed my professors so much, that I entered it into the student show my senior year.
This piece had been in regular rotation in my portfolio for years. But as the web moved more away from Flash-based content, and more toward gif-based animations and responsive code, this piece began to collect virtual dust. Now, all that’s left of it is an outdated SWF (small web file) and some screen grabs.
But thanks to some trial and error, and a little help from resourceful internet users, I was able to recover much of this work. Granted, it’s not perfect. But that’s what tends to happen to moving images as one technique goes out of style and another one replaces it: Digital replaces film, CSS & HTML replace sliced JPEGS and tables, and GIFs replace Flash. The stuff doesn’t age well. But the foundations are solid.