Just like the lyrics in Kris Allen’s song Live Like We’re Dying, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. It sounds like a lot, but it’s not. Time is going by crazy fast. How is that song 11 years old? I feel like I just heard it on the radio. Maybe I just didn’t notice it for the first 5-10 years. Anyway, while you want as many seconds in your day as you can get, that’s not the case for the number keyframes in your Hype project.
A conventional clock only shows 12 hours of time, instead of 24 hours. Yet, even if you divide by two, would you really want a Hype project that’s 43,200 seconds long? That’s where JavaScript can help. This week’s free Hype Template was created without the use of keyframes. Instead, the seconds, minutes, and hours indicators are moved dynamically. Since the project is dynamically driven, the timing data can also be displayed in a legible format.
There really isn’t an alternative. Even if you painstakingly added 43,200 keyframes, one for each second of time in a 12-hour period, where should the project start? Hype, by default, doesn’t know the time of day. While Tumult Hype is mighty software, some things simply require coding. Creating a clock is a prime example.
See the “Timing” chapter in A Book About Hype for more details. You can also download the Timing Template to see how it works.