I’m not sure where I stand on Flash/Actionscript. Not to suggest I don’t like/approve of it, I think it’s an amazingly flexible language/set of tools, I’m just not sure I should be playing with it.

My problem is that I rarely get offered Flash work so I don’t get a huge amount of practice. I have no real sense of how long it will take me to do something or what it’s worth, so in turn I tend to warn clients of this and probably end up undercharging them to a stupid degree. I enjoy the process of working with Actionscript, although ONLY if I’m using my PC with the stupidly big monitor. Theworkspace has improved since Adobe took over but it’s still far too cluttered and has hints of the old Macromedia workspace that I was never able to get my head around.

Anyway, once I’ve got past the “Oh fuck do I have enough hours to do this job in?” stage it always pans out ok, I HATE doing Flash work in a hurry, I’m happy to hack up PHP and HTML in my sleep but anything with Actionscript involved needs me to open my eyes and concentrate for a while, I like to leave that bit of space for the inevitable bit that turns out to be slightly trickier to code than expected.

I’ve just done my first Actionscript job of this year, I would have enjoyed it more had I had more than an evening to do it in but in this case it was an “OhGodWe’reAtTheDeadlineCanYouHelp?” type brief. I generally refuse these but Nick gives me a good amount of interesting work, and more importantly pays on time which really swings it for me. He needed a scrolling Flash menu system as part of a bigger flash project, I felt a bit in the dark trying to write functions for a system I didn’t have much information on but it worked out ok (pending Nick getting back to me). He needed it as a proof of concept to show the end client it would work ok, so to some extent I could have cheated and just shoved in some animation that looks like it works but frankly I’d rather do it properly first off.

Look at my sexy flash menu and read EXCITING notes on the brief and what it does.

It’s roughly based on a menu I worked on for Oliis. This one includes a back-end php/mysql system to edit it.

Just a note on the Killer B-Movie gig, it’s on the 31st March not the 21st. I am an idiot, I cannot read my own diary properly.