The Itsy Bitsy Spider Flash Project

Artist Statement
My interactive ended up being completely different than what I had first expected. I was hoping to do a poem, but since the ones I wanted to use were copyrighted, that idea was definitely gone. I then thought about doing an interactive assignment that was similar to the example of the “Seven Deadly Sins”, but having it on the “Seven Natural Wonders of the World”. After playing around in Flash last class, I decided I wasn’t as keen on this idea either. That’s when I had the idea of animating a nursery rhyme.
I chose “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” because it was one of my favorite nursery rhymes growing up. I remember learning the hand motions to this famous nursery rhyme from my grandmother when I was a little kid. This inspired me to go outside your normal cartoonish animation and incorporate my own interpretation to the assignment. I felt it was a fun way to change things up a little bit, but I was worried about the amount of work it would entail.
I started out the project by getting a friend to photograph my hands while performing the nursery rhyme motions. This took some time since I had to stop at each movement to have a snapshot taken. I then brought all of these photographs, approximately twenty of them, into Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, I used the polygonal tool on every single picture to outline the hands and crop them from the background. This was one of my most time consuming tasks throughout the whole interactive assignment. I then resized the image and imported it into Flash. I also recorded the guitar playing the melody of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”. After debating about singing it, I decided I would add kinetic text for the lyrics and have the guitar as a nice background accent. After attempting to import the audio file as a .wav multiple times, I realized I had to convert it to an AIFF file in Audacity. This was a minor glitch that didn’t take too long to resolve.
Once in Flash, I imported all of my Photoshopped images as well as my audio file. I then created the “play” button after drawing my spider. Throughout the project, I would use a variety of my pictures to create the images of my hands moving. I had to keep watching my project to hear the music and time out the kinetic text so that the lyrics would match up with the background music. When picking fonts, I tried to pick different types that I felt corresponded with the words that they were scripting. For example, I picked a child-like font for the beginning and other words throughout the project. I also chose my color scheme for the backgrounds based off this child-like idea. Since my target audience is, obviously, a younger generation such as the 2-5 range, I chose colours that corresponded with this age. Blue, yellow, and pink are the classically known “baby” colours, which is why I felt they worked well with my project.
Even though this project was way more time consuming than I predicted and I had a lot of obstacles, I am still pretty happy about my final product. I know there are certain aspects that could have been better, but I still feel that I did a pretty good job, especially since it was my first time working with the Flash program. (Other than the tutorials we’ve worked on in class). I tried to include a variety of actions that we learned such as the spider button at the beginning and the ‘again’ lyric that I turned into a button at the end. I also used tweening, symbols, kinetic text, and many other elements. I knew that it would be a challenge, and I was surprised with how well I actually utilized the tools in the Flash program in my project. I’m very proud to call “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” a Michelle Chieng original!


1. I learned a lot from doing this animation project. I found out how time consuming flash can be as well as frustrating. There were many elements I wanted to incorporate into my flash that I couldn't figure out or get to work. Even though there were many times when I wanted to throw the computer on the ground and give up, I felt very accomplished once the project was completed. I found that it can take a lot of hours to create a simple thirty second project which completely blows my mind. I have so much more respect for animators and people who work with flash on a daily basis.
2. I was very impressed with the other students' flash projects. Everyone had creative ideas and I think all the projects were pretty well done. It was interesting to see the various elements other people were able to include in their project and the tools they utilized in flash to complete their work.