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Web animations and interactive Web games help to create immersive environments that keep audiences engaged and on site, which is the key to any Web communication strategy.

Although the Web user experience has improved substantially with user-centered tools, entertaining Web animations and Web games that possess the sophistication required to keep a deep and diverse audience engaged are still a rare breed.

Way back in the last century, noted film critic André Bazin used the term presence to describe the sense the audience has of being transported to the same space and time as the moving images playing before their eyes. This is what we should strive for when creating entertainment for the Web, the cinematic effect of transporting an audience through different dimensions, where the passage of real time becomes irrelevant.

One major difference between film and Web directors is the camera. For film directors, the camera is the brush they use to paint a story and transport us, the audience, into their imaginary world, creating that sense of presence that Bazin talks about. This is even true for traditional animation directors, who also have a number of camera effects at their disposal (and at great expense) as they film and composite each frame of their animated movies.

With the emergence of Toon Boom Studio™ on the Flash® animation scene, Web directors can now enjoy the same power as filmmakers by taking a virtual camera in their hand to create filmic sequences for animated Web movies and interactive Web games. Tightly coupled with Flash® MX 2004 and 8, thanks to the Toon Boom Studio™ Importer (TBSi), Web animation and game directors can now develop cinematic camera effects that will elevate Web entertainment to the next level.

We have built interactive demo content for a game, Shadow Saves the World;, using Toon Boom Studio™ to develop the characters, props, and camera sequences and Flash® to add text, dialog boxes, and the scripting that brings the piece all together. In this tutorial, we are going to show you how we developed the content using both of these tools.

Shadow Saves the World is composed of three scenes. The first two scenes develop the context for the action that will involve the user. In these two scenes, the camera work helps to build the tension and the anxiety for our character, and for the player, who will take over Shadow’s role.

For this tutorial, we are going to look at the dialogue scene between Jane and Shadow. We will give you pre-drawn and animated sequences so that you can focus your attention on the camera.

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