Living in Oblivian

This movie has a smart way to tell the story with real life and dream are mixing together. The way it divided into 3 part make me remember about the Lola rennt (run Lola run) movie.



However, like other movies such as The Butterfly Effect which using a quite new approach in narrative, I think people who just want to watch movie for entertaining purposes might not like this movie. They may prefer movies like Rambo or Rebound.

I really like the acting of Steve Buscemi. He's really a great actor and I wonder why he doesn't have an Oscar. I used to watch his performance in ConAir (with Nicholas Cage) and The Island. Although he was only a supporting actor in these films, his performance was still very impressive.

Back to the movie, this is the first movie I've ever watch tell about relationships between members in a film crew. It is just like a movie in another movie. The change between color and grayscale scenes is also brilliant.

Change in the XML files' structure

As I posted before, the Hiragana project use XML files to hold multiple question for quiz. And in the project proposal, I specified that this file contains sections with each one is one question as following:


_ url address (or identifier in the Flash library) to the Hiragana symbol
_ correct answer
_ wrong answer
_ wrong answer
_ wrong answer





However, I have made a new structure in the current version of our project which is more compact and flexible.

New structure of XML files

In this structure, I don't keep the whole multiple choice question as the previous one. Instead of that, I only keep the url address of the Hiragana symbol and its right pronunciation. Therefore, the Flash has to work more. In the old structure, it has only one task which is choose questions randomly from the file and display them onto the screen. Now, it has to create the question by itself.

Firstly, the Flash choose randomly a Hiragana symbol from the file (including the url address and the pronunciation). The pronunciation of this symbol is also the correct answer. The Flash will continue to seek for 3 other wrong answers from the remaining file. After having 1 correct answer and 3 wrong answer, it shuffles and display with the image of the Hiragana symbol.

Insert a movie clip from the library in Flash

As I've posted before, our project has a quiz part which requires loading external image files to the Flash. However, the disadvantage of loading an external bitmap file in Flash 8 is the loaded pictures become jaggy.

Jaggy picture (the "ra" hiragana symbol)

Although hiragana symbols are originally vector images (they are drawn in Illustrator), they become bitmap images when we exported them into jpeg files and Flash 8 doesn't have the anti-aliasing function for bitmap images.

To avoid this problem, the solution is to make each hiragana symbol to be a movie clip. This will keep the image at vector format and get rid of the the jaggy problem.

Firstly, we have to make movie clips for hiragana symbols. They are just simple 1-frame movie clips with the content are Hiragana characters. However, we have to set the identifier in the linkage property of the movie clip.

The identifier of the movie clip of the "a" hiragana symbol

After that, we just have to put the action script into frame 1 of the Flash.

// attach the movie clip onto the stage
_root.attachMovie("a","canvas",1);
// position the new movie clip
setProperty("canvas",_x,"300");
setProperty("canvas",_y,"150");
// stop the movie
stop();

And the result is the appearance of the movie clip on the stage without creating any instances.