Flash Website

I haven't posted in a while due to being mega mega busy - with college work, band stuff (members coming and going) and house hunting and soon, moving!
The next few posts will basically be an update of what I have done since the Title Sequence brief including some lovely reviews that I have done as I have gone along and only now can be bothered to post up on here... ooops.
So I shall start here. The next brief after the Title Sequence was a Flash Website.

The Brief was entitled 'Artist' and basically we had to choose a person who we could produce a website about. The Artist preferably had to have a good catalogue of work to talk about and display and the person had to be someone interesting - obviously.
I chose the anime director Hayao Miyazaki. His work with Studio Ghibli and also as one of its' co-founders, had always interested me and I wanted to find more about him. I found him to be the perfect choice for me. Plus I love his films!
We had a few lessons on Flash, which was the application we were to use for this brief. All in all, during the lessons I understood completely... but when it came to applying it myself... completely lost!
For the website, we had to think about content, usability, interface and navigation. The right amount of information has to be shown and everything has to be easy to navigate around. For my research I looked at other Flash websites, noting down how many pages they had, how easy it was to use them, the look of them and how much I found out from them. After this I began researching into Hayao Miyazaki - his background in animation, his catalogue of work, his influences, the awards he has won and what he is up to at present were factors I paid close attention to. I had to think: if I was new to this person and wanted to find out more about him, what would I ask first/what would I want to know about?
After researching in depth Hayao, I set about thinking about the layout of my website and what information should and shouldn't be included.
Overall I went for a nature theme - in research I found out that Hayao loved nature, had lots of plants in his studio and it features heavily in his films. The layout was a white background with a tree to the right hand side. On the tree were the buttons for the menu - shown as planks of wood attached to the tree and each with a button name like home, biography, gallery, etc. Information for each page was displayed in the middle within a cream coloured box. I went for very neutral/natural colours. To add abit of activity to it, I animated leaves falling to the ground as part of the background. I produced a very simple looking site - which I hope met the guideline of being easy to use. I think overall the lack of knowledge and understanding of Flash led me to produce something under the standard and I was disappointed with the end result. On another hand I felt I tried my best and at there were times where I was inputting the correct information into Flash only for it to not work and felt that my site was full of bugs. I found actionscript frustrating to use as although I followed my notes I had made in class - where they had worked in class - it didn't work when it came to doing it myself.
Along with finding it frustrating and things not working when I wanted them to, I ran over my deadline time and ended up handing it in unfinished.
Needless to say I didn't really enjoy this project. I found it frustrating that the things I was taught in class, where they had worked aswell, didn't work when I came to work on it myself. It has put me off website design abit, but overall feel it has been a good challenge.... it has also further confirmed that I much prefer video editing and post production.