Title: Foraging! An Ant Story (2019)

Description: [sniff] [sniff] What’s this?! I smell the aroma of sweet sugary nectar coming from outside.  Better go investigate!  This is a quick Flash animation story that shows an ant’s typical day of searching for food.  The Ant simply crawls out of its nest, slurps up the orange fruit, and returns some of the food back to the nest.  He also encounters his fellow nest mates along the way.  The animation utilizes interactivity midway through the story to engage the viewer.  It also uses music and sound effects to enhance the story.

Tool(s) Used:  Adobe Animate

Highlighted skills: Animation, Adobe Animate, Flash, sound effects, music

Reflection:

            When I created this project, I began by applying the background elements of the landscape to the first layer.  My intention was to simulate the character walking across the screen via having the background scroll across the screen.  These elements include the clouds, brushes, rocks, and other ants.  This technique of scrolling the background allowed for the viewer to keep their eyes in one place on the ant and make it appear the ant covered a vast distance, and not be affected by the screen limitations.  To create the return-home effect, I simply reversed the animation applied to the background elements.  I think the background effect work as intended and one of the features I appreciate most about the project.  The next step was creating the main ant on a second layer.  This was created simply by creating three circles representing the ant’s body, then setting up the animation of the walking legs on another layer.  This simplistic creation allowed me to move the character around the environment to fit the story and to enhance the eating animation in Scene 2.

            Some of the challenges I faced when I was creating this project was trying to get the timing of the features to align with different points in the animation, specifically, the sound effects and music.  I wanted the walking sound effects to begin, right when the ant appeared on the scene, but also wanted the music to delay playing until he started searching for food.  I would have issues with some sounds playing too early or playing longer than intended.  After doing some tweaking as I became more proficient with Adobe Animate, I was able to fix the errors.

            The improvements on this project was the addition of more ants.  That was the intention of the original project idea but with project time constraints for the assignment, I decided to forgo that feature.  I added more ants to liven up the environment.  The additional ants are shown returning food to the nest or just walking around.  To create this, I simply copied the main character ant, reversed it, and added the food to each of them to form an ant trail.