www.mental-distortions.com - Ron Chiu's digital portfolio site

Flash has always been one of those things where people either love it, or they hate it. Usually, when I design websites, I try not to include flash unless specifically asked to, mainly due to accessibility issues. The recent Eolas case against Microsoft over the use of Active-X embed also reduces the accessibility of flash further when using Internet Explorer browsers. Now, before a flash movie will run properly, you must click on the flash object before it will function properly in Internet Explorer browsers, however, this does not affect Mozilla Fire Fox, which still renders SWF files normally.

One work-around, which has become popular over the past year, is the use of the SWFObject javascript developed by Geoff Stearns and can be found on his blog HERE. The use of this script gives you much cleaner looking code, and because it does not use object and embed tags like how Dreamweaver does, where it tries to become everything for everyone, you’re not dealing with any code bloat. Just link to the script in the head of your page and call for the script in your code where you want the SWF file placed, and you’re done. Clean semantic code that validates to W3C standards. And nowhere near as complicated as Flash Satay, as described in this article from A List Apart, and overcomes some of the search engine and accessibility issues it still presented.

Below is a gallery of some of my work. To view, simply click on a thumbnail and a new window will open.

Interactive

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	Vampire Hunter Sayako 2006 Flash Game Simple shooter game where you have to shoot as many monsters as you can in 90 seconds.
	Supa Crazy Ill 2006 Interactive Flash Media Little cartoon figure of me dancing to cool music. Turn music on and off, select tunes, have limbs flail about freely. Make me dance!
	EFG Companies 2006 Small Interactive Flash Site Small flash microsite for EFG Companies.

Flash Movies

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	Moneris Gift Cards Promo Flash Movie 2006 Simple Flash movie with Moneris’ Gift Cards sliding all around to music.
	Far From Home 2006 Originally a class assignment, to make a sort of Flash music video. Utilizing filters for the first time, which is a new feature of Flash 8, for the smoke, text effects at the start, and to simulate "motion blur" of the propeller rotations..
	Microsoft X-Box – Conception 2002 Illustrations, Animation: Ron Chiu Concept, Storyboards, Animation: Ricardo Santos Animation, ActionScripting: David Mamber Flash movie built in late 2002 for the Canadian X-Box site.  Illustrations originally done in Corel Draw and imported into Flash.