FXpression 05: Rules and Guidelines

by kirupa (https://www.kirupa.com/me/index.htm) | filed under kirupaLab (https://www.kirupa.com/lab/index.htm)

Introduction

A common feature you have all seen on the site's home page is the randomly moving circles. But, we decided to make some changes to those special effects. That is where you come in! Your task is to create new and better special effects that will be displayed along with the random circle animations that I created a long long time ago.

The original example was a Flash animation of randomly moving circles. It can be seen at https://www.kirupa.com/lab/contest_rules.htm#introduction.

Remember, the last day for submitting entries was July 7th. Submit early and submit often!

Instructions

We didn't want you to spend a lot of time recreating the above layout, text, etc. So, we provided everything you needed to focus only on creating a really nice background special effect. The following files for Flash MX should provide what you need:

Download Contest Files (https://www.kirupa.com/lab/contest.zip)

After unzipping those files, here is what you do:

1. Open your_effect.fla in either Flash MX or MX 2004.
2. Create your random special effect. For example, most of the effects that you see on this site involve the random circles, but you are free to not use circles!
3. Once you have created your special effect, publish the animation. Run testing.swf to see how your animation would look if it were to be used on kirupa.com.
4. Upload your FLA and SWF to the contest forum.

Guidelines

- The maximum file size of your final SWF should not exceed 10k.
- Do not use images and sound.
- All content should be internal. In other words, no content should be loaded from an external location.
- Ensure that your animation is not taxing on the CPU.
- Try to make sure your final effect is predominantly blue colored, for most of the site is designed to only look well with a blue-ish tint. If you use the same blue colors used on this site, that would be great.
- Avoid any and all text in your entries.

Tips

Many special effects tutorials I have written involve the fiendish circles and cool things you can do with them. A good place to start is the Random Circles (https://www.kirupa.com/lab/circles.htm) experiment, and its source file.