Complete flash n00b

mood: annoyed
mood pic from behindinfinity

Never let a complete flash n00b do something that is worth RM1000!!!

Complete flash n00b: me

Yes! Me who-has-never-even-made-a-straight-line-move-an-inch-in-flash-during-high-school-even-though-it-costs-30-marks-in-the-ICT-test-just-because-it’s-troublesome!

Of course, when money is involved, naturally anyone would be excited to. This is a real challenge to me. Apart from not knowing how to function flash in the beginning, I had no flash software at home, and no computer either since it so nicely completely crashed a few days after receiving the project, and thus had to migrate to my old house in my hometown where there is no internet other than the cyber café and the wi-fi about 2km from home because my cousin lives there, who owns a notebook complete with Microsoft office 2007, Macromedia flash 8, Photoshop CS3 Extended, CorelDRAW and a whole bunch other graphic software.

Migrating was not such a big deal to me of course since my sister, who works with my cousin, will be there for me to annoy and pick on (take note that I mean ‘older’ sister). The big deal was that the notebook would only be available for me to use after she comes back from work, which is after office hours. That would also equal to me working like an owl from around 7PM to 6AM. Thankfully not continuously. I do my best to procrastinate without being noticed. I usually pull in much earlier than the time I should, my earliest would be at 3AM my latest would be 5:50AM.

The working hours are okay with me since I don’t think I can function well with the many distractions of the day. The next problem would be the project itself. I had to make karaoke-like animations for Arabic kids’ song. Hah. My main language is English and Malay as well as some Japanese and tidbits of Korean but Arabic? I did learn that language when I was 7 until I turned 11 but after that, I entered public school because my mom became a single mother and could no longer afford private schools. Even then I didn’t learn it seriously. I’m 18 now. I haven’t practiced my Arab in a long time. Yes, 7 years IS long enough to make your language skills rusty.

Apart from my rusty language, I had to face the problem of transferring the lyrics on a paper into the notebook. What the… yeah… My sister had an old friend of hers fix this problem and now the notebook is able to write not only Arab but also Thai, Korean and Katakana. Why Katakana and not just Hiragana and maybe the whole Kanji itself? Beats me. It wasn’t me who asked for it. My role was only to look ecstatic and misuse it.

After that problem had been taken care of and the keyboards get new looks courtesy of the stickers with the Arabic letters, I face another problem! Flash turns the words backwards! What to do? There’s probably a million ways to fix this that I somehow didn’t get wind of but I used the ‘type in MSWord-print screen-crop in paint-turn to .jpg’ method. It’s troublesome but like I said, I didn’t get wind of the other 999,999 ways to fix this.

Now that cropping is done, let’s implement it!...fuck. Here is where I start to hyperventilate because I am a complete flash n00b. Cry me a river, please do. A few days prior to the installation of the multi-lingual setting, I had experiment flash with a few Japanese songs that I could remember the lyric like RADWIMP’s ‘Teromoro’ and D.Gray-man’s ‘Tsunaida te ni kisu wo’. I really liked how it turned out but because it was only for experimenting, I only did the first verse of it without the chorus. Toremoro gave quite a problem to me since the song is fast and it was my first try. With Tsunaida te ni kisu wo, it was much easier for me and I really did it karaoke like with the colour change but like Toremoro, I barely did half it.

So I start to do the song and –PING!– realized that I needed to listen to the song first before I could continue. I stuck the CD in the RW DVD thingy and waited for it to process. The songs were easy to follow, considering it’s for kids and all, and I think I’ve already got two songs stuck in my head already. Oh great. Damn. I attempted to transfer it into the flash library but it failed. To my utter despair (ZETSUBOUSHITAAAAAA!!!!) flash didn’t support the song format. I went ‘what the…’ again.

It couldn’t be helped so I decided to bitch about it to my sister since she has that old friend of hers. After a day, that old friend, who she refers to as Alien (a sick pet name, I tell ya) and I call Ah Lien to be more polite, sends me an Adobe Audition 1.5 installation CD. I continued to bitch around when the installer wanted a serial number and he told my sister and my sister told me to open a crack folder. Crack folder? Yes, I see it. A folder named crack. For a second there, I thought he expected me to find some lunatic file on rampant. Without even a guide, I converted the song files into mp3 and delightfully noted that flash accepted it.

Yes, those were the hardships I had to go through to get the project up and running. I’m also working alone. A n00b working alone is not good. I told my mom that I wanted to recruit my best friend, Shiro-kun to do my lining for me and perhaps contribute ideas. She retorted with a: “Are you planning to pay her? How are you going to distribute the money after this? This is a family project, why can’t you let your sisters help you?” Family project my…argh… the only contribution I felt they were giving me was not to disturb me. Doesn’t that make me want to bang my head on a random wall?

Back on subject, so far, I’ve turned 3 out of 6 tracks into flash karaokes. Phase I is half done. Phase II: animating objects is worrying me. Phase III seems so far away. And I have to get everything done before the last week of May.

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dare ga, tasuketeeeeee!!!!!!!
*dies*