USQ 5622 - multimedia portfolio pages of Graham Taylor

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Activity 3.7 - animated car

Please note that with a slow connection this animation may take a short time to load. It will play automatically when the download is completed. To view it again please visit another page, eg, 3.6, then return here. Refreshing your browser window may also work, depending on which browser you are using.

What I have learned: You will notice that by the time I finished trialing and errorring in Fireworks, autumn had arrived, night had fallen and I certainly didn't have time to wash the car!

To ensure relatively smooth progress of the car I settled on using 50 frames. This enabled me to play with individual time frames for acceleration and deceleration and leave about 30 frames in the middle for top speed. The first frame was timed in seconds to allow a pause before starting. I was pleasantly surprised that the .gif file was only 20k. I could also see how teenage drivers could add dust clouds in the relevant frames. I was certainly impressed by FSS based on this brief encounter. There seemed to be alternative ways to achieve this effect described in the forum that need exploration. I also suspect I could have done this in Image Ready.

As noted in 3.6, there is much to learn about the way browsers display animated gifs. I tested on 4 browsers (for Mac) and noticed variations. Firstly, the way they tested on the local drive was somewhat different to the behaviour on the web, eg, originally I set the gif to 2 reps to demonstrate a repeat effect and got 2 reps. on some but not others. Only Netscape displayed it twice on the web, and then only at the first loading. Reloading the page was not always a reliable way of setting the animation going again whereas going to another page and then returning was. Furthermore, the relative speed changes in the gif were more apparent in some browsers than others. Fortunately it worked best in IE, still the most used by a very long way. While I feel I have fully met all the criteria of the task, this is clearly an area for close further attention and illustrates the critical importance of 'live' testing.