I remembered Macromedia (yes, that Macromedia before acquired) announced in the new release of Studio 8 in 2005: Flash is communication. Usually that means they offered Flash to web and mobile, and a high rate of people could reach Flash.

But communication has another meaning. Communication not only to speak a sentence, but should also tell stories, to let listener good understanding, and experience. In the web design world, Flash has been excellent, mostly together with graphics design, and make them move. But, there’s a large number of Flash design today it just move, not motion, not truely experience.Film tells stories, a perfect kind of communication, film could even make you cry, make you laugh, that’s the effective of telling a story. Today I have seen some good designed Flash also some effects of film-like, and really good experience, not to cry or to laugh, but impressive. That’s communication!

Well, Flash meanly transmitted via Internet, to give people some film experience you can use Real/MS Media, even youtube? No, Flash is interactive, better to communicate even than those! (Further more, I found mostly direct video services through Internet they’re all in equal quality of all details, and when we want to see more details on some parts of screen, never could.)

So why I think Flash could be combined film visual effects in some ways?

First, Flash is from film techniques, the way you using in After Effects might some day be used in Flash design. Flash donot support 3D, but you could design fake 3D; donot support 3D animation and filter effects, you could use actionscript to make it happen(of course a balance for CPU/Memory overload).

Second, eyes like to abstract a screen while ignore details. Film gives all details from a camera, but eyes try to ignore many of them; when eyes feel a line or a curve of screen, they will acknowledge that first, and check which details eyes perfer to see. So even Flash have to cut many details to save bytes, if good designed, experience could be the same (maybe light weight of course).

Third, FLV alpha film support. Not everything can do with a browser Flash plug-in with complex film techniques(for example you need a Trapcode shine effect, even you can code), but with FLV alpha support, it will reduce some essential tasks from Flash design/develop to film post-production applications. Even sometime just some parts of the film, several seconds, they will make a perfect experience of film with Flash, also, interactive.

Especially in early years, Flash had some bit bad name in web world. Instead of waiting a long download time for Flash movie to play, people would click the ’skip intro’ button. That’s a nightmare of Flash design, because of the big size of movie. Though it’s not so easy to decrease bytes of a SWF file while keeps the quality, what ever in another side, we could always find some Flash in good design playing smoothly and even experience like watching a scene of film. SWF file while it download, will display each frame until downloaded all assets of that frame, so it’s very essential to know how to organize assets to be downloaded in each frame. Many Flash designers like to ignore this and put every thing to download in the first stage, to display a first page and their main scenes wouldn’t start until everything is ready.

Adobe has a good example of this, a neat advertisement movie for their own CS 2. In the first one or two seconds, it display a line of text with a button to begin. This give them some seconds to download their underneath assets. The whole SWF file actually has about 4M bytes, that wouldn’t be easy to display if they didn’t organized well with the bandwidth profiler. After the button is clicked, a transition of bluring the background, scene changes into table and papers. It also give some seconds for underneath downloading surely, as well as position animation time it needed. From this case we could have some good methods to make a good Flash movie even in big size, using some effects/animations to capture some time to download assets to display smoothly. Unlike film compositing and post-production, Flash design like this (herein I called ‘Neat film’) need to have to balance of speed, bandwidth, the size of assets to play. It’s much limited but it could.

This method could be work only for design-based Flash movie, for Flash developers it wouldn’t be useful as Flash codes are mostly not working on frames. I would try to figure out some other methods later.

Conclusion

To play a big size SWF quickly and smoothly (based on frame structure):

• Display small size assets first.
• Use some transition/animation methods to steal some seconds for underneath downloading of big size assets.
• Keep a continuous balance on design, motion speed, bandwidth, organization of assets.