Please participate: Survey about new resources for ad animation and production

[GreenSock 12,851 Likes (Superhero)]

Please help us gauge if it would be worthwhile to get more involved with creating some products / services for banner developers. Perhaps that would be templates, videos, podcast new tools for fancy effects…we're not sure. Our goal is to better understand the needs out there and see if we can address the pain points, perhaps with a partner of ours who has a ton of knowledge in the banner ad space. 

 

http://goo.gl/forms/2ZZ3c3vzRt

 

Please take a few minutes and fill it out; be as brutally honest as possible. 

 

If you want to chime in with other ideas that aren't mentioned, that's totally fine too (drop them in this thread below or in the survey itself).

 

Thanks!

[somnamblst 197 Likes (Specialist)]

Just chiming in with what I feel is helpful with frame scripts in Animate CC.

 

I like to separate frame scripts, so they are in keyframes above the object being tweened on the timeline, though not necessary.

 

It helps me quickly keep track of which named instance I am tweening, as I often can't remember what I named an instance.

 

I definitely think templates, with slower more appropriate to banner copy animations, will be helpful, to people who would like to use GSAP, but are concerned they don't have enough time, given the numerous sizes, they have to build.

[CraigWheatley 49 Likes (Newbie)]

I really like the idea of videos with tips and tricks - although a few years back I found that Carl had already done some!

http://www.snorkl.tv/

[Carl 9,755 Likes (Superhero)]

Hey Craig,

 

Glad to know there are still some survivors from the Snorkl.tv days

Really great to have you contributing around here. Hope you feel at home.

 

Carl

[volcanoflash 121 Likes (Specialist)]

Guys you are moving to really strong position on ads market and I love most of your ideas! Thank you all!

[Carl 9,755 Likes (Superhero)]

Thanks for chiming in, VolcanoFlash. Always nice to hear the perspective of our users. Happy Tweening!

[somnamblst 197 Likes (Specialist)]

I think you can assume there are a sizable number of banner creators, who are Flash fluent, and who are or will be using Animate to create banners. 

 

One of the things from the Flash days that made learning Flash relatively easy, was the FLA, a container file, that had everything packed into it. On Stack Overflow, Lanny of gskinner.com, is always correcting users who think a jsfiddle example is superior to an FLA, in order to help answer an Animate CC question.

 

Being able to pick apart an FLA provided by, what was referred to on the Kirupa forum as a "math head", as opposed to an "art head", was a big part of the appeal of the Kirupa forum, with math heads and art heads playing well together.

 

To attract new users who may be art heads to GSAP, I think it would be helpful to provide sample reusable FLAs, with clearly commented frame scripts, with a timeline that mimics the progression of most banner animations, headline or image, tagline, final frame and CTA, even though a math head would likely create a file that was a single frame FLA, 

 

I made an offer on the Adobe Animate CC forum, of my sample banner FLA, and the revisions to the HTML file that make them DCM ready, and I constantly get PMs asking for it. The message I forward with the attachments includes a link to this forum, because the Adobe forums really do suck...

[Carl 9,755 Likes (Superhero)]

@somnablast, thanks for sharing. I appreciate the thought and perspective.

 

From a support perspective I totally get Lanny's desire to see a fiddle. I spent a lot of time offering Flash support and its a real drag downloading an fla, possibly un-zipping it,  fixing it, zipping it and then uploading it – each time a revision is made. The CodePen / jsFiddle workflow is a huge time saver. click a link, fork, fix, paste link

 

From a user standpoint converting createjs output to a CodePen / jsFiddle is a bit of a nightmare. I've done it once or twice with plenty of mistakes along the way. 

 

When I was deep into Flash / AS3 I loved the self-containment of the fla.

 

Here's one for the Animate CC team: Export to CodePen

 

To attract new users who may be art heads to GSAP, I think it would be helpful to provide sample reusable FLAs, with clearly commented frame scripts, with a timeline that mimics the progression of most banner animations, headline or image, tagline, final frame and CTA, even though a math head would likely create a file that was a single frame FLA, 

 

 

Yeah, from the survey the "banner templates" were the among the most highly requested assets. We haven't yet figured out how much Animate CC will play into that. We made a little dent with the source files from the Cory Hudson articles and my guess is that we would blow out a few more for Animate.

 

Glad to hear you have been trying to recruit over in the Animate forums

[somnamblst 197 Likes (Specialist)]

Actually it was Lanny who chastised others for criticizing an attached FLA rather than a Fiddle. The complaint was, "who wants to download an FLA?"

 

Anyone who actually has an interest in effectively troubleshooting an Animate CC framescript question.

 

You may not have that many requests from Animate banner builders because the UI does make it easy to not do anything with frame scripts I mainly reserve them for dramatic lockups, or product entrances. 

 

In one of the Animate Max presentations a number was given for the people who are Flash fluent and it was a really big number. In fact it was a tremendous number. Some people would say it is the best number.

 

What I would like to figure out is animation start based on visibility, as I have seen my ads in the wild, where they were below the fold and had finished playing..

[emmanuelulloa 31 Likes (Newbie)]

My ¢0.02:

 

As I'm seeing the market moving since August 2015 GSAP is the obvious winner amongst hand-code developers,  also I would like to see a couple of things happening in the future:

1) GSAP more integrated into Animate CC, not needing to create templates but have them right there in the program.

2) Visual tools to facilitate the development of banners that is not dependent on Flash/Animate/Canvas.  TweenUI (https://tweenui.com/)  is a nice example.  But I it will be nice to have more.  One that integrates SVG and GSAP maybe?