Excitement!
I rarely update, which I should probably remedy, but I really need to share my happiness over this one.
Many of you know that I've become the Computer Specialist of the Yale University Bands for 2006 (and a little bit of 2007). What I'm not sure how many of you know is that it has been charged to a few of us to create an information CD for distribution to the prefrosh at Bulldog Days. The CD is to contain pictures, video, text blurbs, and menus linking one to the other. Essentially, it's an enhanced CD, and being the CompSpec, most of the burden for creating the skeleton for this CD -- the menus and the flash videos on which the information and media will appear -- falls on me.
Before I started on this project, I had zero experience with this sort of thing. I'd never so much as opened Flash MX to create a montage of 3 JPEGs which looped over and over. I was being asked to make menus which faded in and out, intro videos which could be skipped by clicking on a button, and buttons which made images change on mouseover, amongst a wide variety of things.
This past Saturday, knowing I had (at most) a week to finish this project, I sat down at a tutorial and beat myself senseless trying to figure out how everything would work. Things were fading. Layers were interacting with one another. But for the life of me, I couldn't get my buttons to do anything. They refused to integrate with the movie at all, and just sat there as part of the foreground image.
About 10 minutes ago, I finally figured it out. The YPMB menu is all but finished, with only a few tweaks and menu text headings to go. (I also still have to add the "Back to Main Menu" button.) This is what the menu looks like at the moment. The image of us in the pregame Y changes depending on which button you mouse over.
It's not great, and I still want to work a little on the spacing of the buttons because they still look a little off (there's no tool which can align the buttons along that curve I've created so I've had to eyeball everything). Still, the fact that I've gotten this far makes me happy.
Once this particular menu is over and done with, I'll feel much more comfortable going back and adding in the additional menus, links between them, and the intro movie. I feel so much better about it now, because everyone else has been doing extraordinarily well with their parts of the CD (Rita and Ali with the YCB info, Rachel and David with the YPMB pics, Diana with the researching and ordering of the CDs and cases and labels, and of course Ben for envisioning all this and helping put it together as well as doing much of the YPMB info), and I thought I would end up being the weak link. I'm happy to have calmed myself down and assured myself that this CD will, in fact, be done for Bulldog Days. When it is, and I can stand and watch them get distributed to the eager prefrosh, a small part of me is going to feel very, very proud of myself.
EDIT [5:15 AM]: Added the text for the sub-menus. I don't think I'll be able to get it to do anything fancy (e.g., glow when you mouse over the button), but this is good enough for me. Here you can see the button change color when it's moused over (though you can't see the cursor) and the picture change. After I took the screenshot, I moved the top button to the left a little bit, since it appears to be the furthest off of any of the buttons.
Many of you know that I've become the Computer Specialist of the Yale University Bands for 2006 (and a little bit of 2007). What I'm not sure how many of you know is that it has been charged to a few of us to create an information CD for distribution to the prefrosh at Bulldog Days. The CD is to contain pictures, video, text blurbs, and menus linking one to the other. Essentially, it's an enhanced CD, and being the CompSpec, most of the burden for creating the skeleton for this CD -- the menus and the flash videos on which the information and media will appear -- falls on me.
Before I started on this project, I had zero experience with this sort of thing. I'd never so much as opened Flash MX to create a montage of 3 JPEGs which looped over and over. I was being asked to make menus which faded in and out, intro videos which could be skipped by clicking on a button, and buttons which made images change on mouseover, amongst a wide variety of things.
This past Saturday, knowing I had (at most) a week to finish this project, I sat down at a tutorial and beat myself senseless trying to figure out how everything would work. Things were fading. Layers were interacting with one another. But for the life of me, I couldn't get my buttons to do anything. They refused to integrate with the movie at all, and just sat there as part of the foreground image.
About 10 minutes ago, I finally figured it out. The YPMB menu is all but finished, with only a few tweaks and menu text headings to go. (I also still have to add the "Back to Main Menu" button.) This is what the menu looks like at the moment. The image of us in the pregame Y changes depending on which button you mouse over.
It's not great, and I still want to work a little on the spacing of the buttons because they still look a little off (there's no tool which can align the buttons along that curve I've created so I've had to eyeball everything). Still, the fact that I've gotten this far makes me happy.
Once this particular menu is over and done with, I'll feel much more comfortable going back and adding in the additional menus, links between them, and the intro movie. I feel so much better about it now, because everyone else has been doing extraordinarily well with their parts of the CD (Rita and Ali with the YCB info, Rachel and David with the YPMB pics, Diana with the researching and ordering of the CDs and cases and labels, and of course Ben for envisioning all this and helping put it together as well as doing much of the YPMB info), and I thought I would end up being the weak link. I'm happy to have calmed myself down and assured myself that this CD will, in fact, be done for Bulldog Days. When it is, and I can stand and watch them get distributed to the eager prefrosh, a small part of me is going to feel very, very proud of myself.
EDIT [5:15 AM]: Added the text for the sub-menus. I don't think I'll be able to get it to do anything fancy (e.g., glow when you mouse over the button), but this is good enough for me. Here you can see the button change color when it's moused over (though you can't see the cursor) and the picture change. After I took the screenshot, I moved the top button to the left a little bit, since it appears to be the furthest off of any of the buttons.