my flash

http://minhthuorchids.com/Flash/nothingness.swf
(please follow the link to watch the animation)

This is the flash I made for my final assignment in DIM1 course. I took inspiration from a falling leaf. I don't know why I have a special feeling to the image of a falling leaf. It gives me the feeling of peace and lightness. Moreover, I also heard a story of a leaf from my mother. When a monk saw a dry leaf falling, he was enlightened from that time. These things inspired me to create a leaf man character in my flash.

In this animation, I want to express a concept in Buddhism, that is everything in this life is just impermanent, nothing can exist forever. I choose the religious mood for this story. The dry leaf falling makes us think of the ephemerality of this life. Life is just very faint as a dream, nothing will exist forever. It is misty and fanciful as a dewdrop. Only good things are kept in soul when ones pass away and begin a new life in the next incarnation. Moreover, you will also find something romantic and funny in this serious theme. The leaf is very happy because it thinks that it has become a human and can re-live. However, life is very short, and the life of this leaf also ends very quickly. At the end of the animation, ones will realize that the romance and the fun in this life are also not permanent. I put a title which is “Return to nothingness” to represent the idea of “Nothingness return to nothingness”. The leaf begins with no life and also ends with no life. No one knows where the leaf begins and where it ends. In order to support this idea, I give the text “THE END” at the sixth scene and the final scene to offer the audiences the concept of “Nothingness returns to nothingness”.
Text appears very simply with font and style to represent the serious meaning of this animation.

In this animation, I had a very big mistake that I had just realized after studying with Ms Maddy. That is I enlarged the picture in Flash to make a zoom-in scene. It makes the background look awful because the image is broken. Also, sound is not very interesting. I should add some more sounds after each action of the leaf man. These things will be the experience for my following animation that I am going to make.