My name is Chris Georgenes and I first started using Flash in 1999. Initially I wasn’t sure how to navigate the timeline or even work with vectors. To be truthful, I only had limited animation experience up until Flash came along. My background is in the fine arts, printmaking, illustration and art history. I earned a B.F.A. from the Hartford Art School in 1989, long before Flash was ever invented. I have always had a roll-up-my-sleeves attitude towards learning and Flash proved to be quite intuitive.
I recall the very moment Flash clicked for me, the moment the haze lifted and it became crystal clear what Flash was all about and how to use it. At the time I was a Creative Director for a small animation studio in the Boston area and we turned to Flash as our main animation program. Most of the content we created was for broadcast television and my understanding of how to deliver engaging content for the web was minimal at best. That was all about to change. Shockwave contracted us to create an animated series for their site www.shockwave.com.
I was already a fan of Shockwave which made this project particularly exciting. It became a crash course on how to use Flash to create animation optimized for the web that also had a fully functional game incorporated into a preloader for dial-up users. As a company we had no experience developing for the web. As an individual, this was a brave new frontier. To make it even more interesting, I had strict deadlines to meet, which all but eliminated the research and development portion of the process. I was smack in the middle of all this unfamiliar technology, directly between the Shockwave producers and my own bosses. All eyes were on me to figure out the artistic and technical issues involved with delivering engaging and interactive content. Funny thing was, I was very new to vector-based animation and my skill level with actionScript was not too much beyond a gotoAndPlay command. Despite my technical shortcomings, I embraced the challenge. Ask me if I was under-qualified and I would answer “yes”, but not without the confidence to deliver the project complete and on time. It just meant I needed to roll up my sleeves a little further.
Read all about me on my blog – KeyFramer.
View my site – Mudbubble.
