My continuing battle with Flash CS4 is getting to be significantly less stressful through the trial and error of putting this new
website of mine together. Fortunately, I'm the kind of person who rarely fucks the same thing up twice (except in the case of relationships, friendships, eating habits, drunk dialing, sexual practices, professional conduct, bill-paying, general spillage and the ever-terrifying sitting-on-one's-own-balls).
The main issue, now that I've sorted out most of the coding problems, is the visual motif I'm going with, having all the information - such as popups, buttons, headers etc - printed out on torn scraps of paper that either crinkle, unfurl or boil depending on how the mouse interacts with them. The torn paper look is something that I've always been fond of aesthetically and it's appeared in several previous projects, such as my short film
'Narcissus', the
'Agnosticaust' album artwork and the
'House Guest' graphic novel to name a few.
To make it authentic I'm designing the assets, printing them out and scanning them back in, several times in some instances depending on what kind of animation is required. The process is tedium incarnate, but it does look pretty good once it's done. The popups themselves consist of six books, fourteen music projects, seven short films and seven music videos, along with bio information and several other elements that have no function other than being ornamental.
The site has five sections, the main page which incorporates some personal info, links and news updates; Music; Film/Animation; Design/Illustration; and Books/Comics. Each of these has a different backdrop, a collage of visuals tailored to each section (eg. the 'Books' section features imagery from various comics and graphic novels, 'Music' features album artwork and so on). The sub-sections have the same opening animation to help stick with the theme, a reverse paper-scrunch that quickly smooths out.
I'm liking the way it's coming together although I'm a little concerned that, with all the visual elements, the loading times for each page may frustrate visitors. Gonna file that one under 'bridge to cross once gotten to'.
