Flash and the Self-Portrait

I enjoyed working with Flash, I felt much more comfortable using the programme and found the extra notes on Moodle extremely helpful as I could scan through them as the workshop progressed.

I was not particularly thrilled at the idea of creating a self-portrait - or having to record my voice - but decided to keep it simple and impersonal. I drew my image using Illustrator, in the style of Julian Opie, whose work I admire for its economy of line, which despite its simplicity manages to communicate intention and emotion. It terms of using his style for my self portrait, I like to think it reflects my confidence in stealing from other artists and (as his work has a very flat, 2D feel) also reflects that I am essentially a simple, two-dimentional charecter.

Anyway, having created my self portrait, it was relatively straightforward to convert the Illustrator layers into Flash symbols. The simple style of drawing made it easier to create the mouth shapes I needed for the lip synch.

When it came to lining up the speech with the mouth shapes, it was a little more difficult than I first thought; I found I was using the letters that I knew the words were made up from rather than the sounds. I had also recorded myself speaking very quickly, which made the process harder again. It seemed like a good idea to record some additional sound and so using the M-Audio device (or “talk-box” as I prefer) I recorded a conversation between myself and my housemate Lora. In the end, I chose to use one of her sentences: “I probably cried the first time I saw Finding Nemo”.