I'm taking Basic Animation this semester, and this is the first _real_ assignment from my class. The assignment: Create a tutorial on playing chess that is between 800 and 1,000 frames long and 12 frames per second. (That translates to about 83 seconds!) Except for one or two other students, everyone else in the class pretty much did some lame little thing that just showed the pieces and how they move. I wanted to do a real (if somewhat basic) tutorial. When this was completed, we had yet to go over buttons or actions or anything, so this is all one scene.

I used the text from Wikipedia on chess, and I abridged it even more. Then I recorded myself reading the text as quickly as I could. I used Audacity to remove the pauses in my recorded speech and speed up the sound file without changing the pitch. Basically, I now sound like the guy on the old Micromachines commercials! I drew the pieces, the board and everything else in Illustrator, and I used Flash MX to animate it. Keep in mind that this is my first _real_ animation. I did do one other one before this, but it was a dinky little online greeting card. I'm not very proud of it, but I liked the idea... so I may recreate it as I get more knowledge.

Also of note, I hit a bit of animator's block when I got to the bit about check and checkmate, so I just animated a chess game to show how check and checkmate worked. It wasn't my original intention, but it still works. If it's going too fast for you (and it most likely is) you can stop it and step through it to read the (super-instead-of-sub)titles.

I can't wait to really start making some cool cartoons. Watch here... I'll be posting more and better soon, I promise!

~AA