Animation Help Please!!

[skylarsmama]

Can someone give me directions on using animations in my flipcharts. What do I need to do to actually get the animations to move. Any help and directions will be greatly appreciated!
Marti????

[saha]

Welcome to the forum Marti.

There are certain action objects in AS that you can use to move the position of the objects.
Is that what you mean by making things move?

If you want movement as in animated movement of objects then you can do one of the following:

-import and then embed animation in flash or gif format in your flipcharts

-create your own animations using tools like
~Macromedia Flash
~Swishmax
~Alligator Flash Designer
~Headstart Opus Pro

[johnshelby]

I am a chemistry teacher and I want to include animations in my flipcharts to help the students to visualize molecular processes. What (low-cost) program would you recommend for me to use to create animations? Thanks.
John

[saha]

Hi John,
I am also a Chemistry teacher.
There are some animations and actions you can already do with the features provided in ActivStudio.
However I do understand that there are some things that you can achieve only with a third party application. One of the best practices that you should adhere to is "good tight integration with Activstudio". So whatever third party tool you use to make your animations, ideally you want a flash output of the animation so that you can embed that in your flipchart. This will make the teaching process smooth and integrated.
It does cause bit of a disruption to the teaching process if you have to link an animation file from Activstudio that has to open a separate application to view it.
"Low cost" is a relative term.
The cheapest and yet most useful in my opinion is "Swishmax' an Australian software. There is a deep academic discount for teachers and students.
The next would be "Opus Headstart Pro" made by a British company "Digital Workshop".
Feel free to browse some of the animations I have made using the following link:

http://www.gautamsaha.com/course/view.php?id=7

Click on the link "login as guest"

If you school system has already invested in a site license for "Flash" then you could use Flash to do any animation. However Flash has a very steep learning curve.

[johnshelby]

Thanks so much Gautam. I have appreciated a lot of your posts in the forum. I took a look at some of the animations you created and I'm impressed! Is it okay with you if I use some of them or would you prefer I don't?

Also, I was wondering if you are familiar with Toufee (www.toufee.com) and, if so, what is your opinion about that program? I was also just informed that Windows Movie is included on my computer for free. I haven't had a chance to explore it yet, but do you think that I could make chemistry animations using that?

Thanks again,

John

[saha]

Hi John
Please feel free to use any and all of the animations on my website for your classroom. If you would like to extract the swf(flash) files of the animations from my website and embed them in your flipcharts, then simply look in the cache of your browser Internet Explorer and copy them from there.

I am not familiar with Toufee, but I will take a look at it and let you know.

Yes Windows Movie maker is included with computers running Windows XP Service Pack 2 and higher. I am afraid that Windows Movie maker would not be useful in my opinion to make animations. It is a good programs to edit video files, cut them up, take segments, join them together and insert power point slides into a movie with a output as windows media file.

In your last message you had mentioned about your interest in showing molecular chemistry animations. You may want to check out "Atomscope" @
http://www.visualsimulations.co.uk/

However these are standalone apps and will not integrate inside a flipchart.

Hope this helps.

[saha]

HI John,
I just checked out Toufee. My recommendation to you as a chemistry teacher who wants to build science animations for students is "NO".
This product is subscription based, you never own it. Besides this is more for building flashy web banners etc and not what you are trying to achieve.

Have you looked at "Swishmax". With a teacher/education discount you can own it for about USD $80.
Also Opus Headstart Pro is definately a strong recommendation.

[johnshelby]

Thanks again!