Before you can walk the walk, you have to talk the talk. This chapter will give you a full overview of the technology, file formats, and image concepts you need to know to begin animating.
Building Your Flash Vocabulary
In this lesson you'll get an introduction to Flash technology, the types of files Flash can create, and the technology required to view your Flash movies.
This video will give you an overview of the two main Flash formats, FLA and SWF. In addition we will discuss the various other file formats you might decide to use when publishing your Flash content.
This chapter will get you all "warm and fuzzy" with the Flash interface. After completing it, you should feel comfortable navigating among Flash's many panels, tools, documents, and dialog boxes.
Getting Comfortable with the Flash Interface
This lesson will get you comfortable with the Flash toolbar, its panels, the Stage, the pasteboard, the Timeline, and the interface as a whole.
Some of the default Flash settings may not be ideal if you're using other Adobe applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Changing a few simple settings will make your life much easier, as you'll see in this video.
Depending on where your Flash movie will land and who your primary audience is, you have a number of choices to make about your movie (Stage) size. This lesson explores the options.
Flash offers two very different ways of creating shapes. In this chapter you will learn the difference between Merge Drawing mode and Object Drawing mode so you can choose the one that is most comfortable for you. We will also cover creating many different basic shapes and optimizing the settings for your Flash shape tools.
Creating Shapes
For longtime Illustrator users, the default Merge Drawing mode in Flash may be challenging. Object Drawing mode was added specifically to make creating Flash shapes simpler, without slicing or merging every overlapping object as you create it. This video explores the difference between the two modes.
In this lesson we'll look at primitive objects, which offer more editability in the Property Inspector. This can be especially useful for modifying shapes after the fact, such as rectangles with rounded corners.
In this video you will learn how to create polygons and stars using the PolyStar tool. We will also cover simple freeform drawing with the Pencil tool.
This chapter will teach you how to create animation in Flash. You will use motion presets and motion tweening to move objects across the Stage, and object tweening to animate shape and color changes to objects.
Animating
In this lesson you'll learn how to quickly animate text using the built-in motion presets.
No Flash course is complete without the most fundamental animation, a bouncing ball. In this video you'll learn how to bounce, work with the Timeline, and tween.
Once your ball is bouncing, we'll introduce more shapes and colors into your animation. In this video you'll learn how to work with multiple shape tweens and animate a color change.
Symbols are the heart of Flash and the reason its file sizes can be so small. This chapter will give you a good introduction to Flash symbols and their repository, the Library.
Symbols and the Library Panel
In the previous exercises we created symbols in order to animate. In this lesson you will learn the importance of creating symbols and the difference between a graphic, a button, and a movie clip.
Once a symbol is created, editing that symbol will modify all instances. In this video you will see some of the most popular effects, such as Brightness, Tint, and Alpha. After editing you will navigate back to your main movie.
A button is actually a group of related objects depending on the state of the button. This lesson will give you a full tour of the anatomy of a button in its various states.
Now that you understand the anatomy of a button, you are ready to learn how to create the states from scratch so you can make your own buttons. This video gives you the lowdown.
The Library in a Flash document stores assets that you have created from scratch as well as vector artwork, text, bitmaps, video, and sound. In addition, every symbol you create is automatically added to the Library panel for future use.
In order to control the length of your Flash animations, you must have a thorough understanding of the Timeline, frames per second (fps), and inserting frames. This chapter lays all that groundwork so you can gain precise control over your Flash movies.
The Flash Timeline
Working with the Timeline in Flash requires some detailed knowledge of the relationship between frames and keyframes. In this lesson you will learn the vocabulary of the Timeline: keyframes, blank keyframes, and property keyframes. We will also look at adding and naming layers.
This is the continuation of your Timeline tour. In this lesson you will create more layers and animate new symbols. You will also name a button in order to get the associated ActionScript to work.
In the final lesson on the Timeline we will review the parts of the Timeline panel. We will also modify the length of an animation and put in a stop command.
The Motion Editor is a relatively new panel to Flash, but is "uber" useful. In this chapter we will dig into the many features and settings the Motion Editor offers to add polish to your finished product.
The Motion Editor
In this lesson we will explore changing the properties of an animation using the Motion Editor. We will create a small photo slideshow, change rotation, and scale animation effects.
In this video you'll see how to use the easing feature of the Motion Editor to simulate the physical properties of objects more realistically in your animations.
Now that you've created some movies of your own, it's time to dig into the settings that will help you achieve perfect, optimized publishing for your intended audience.
Distributing and Publishing Flash Animations
This video looks at the various options available for the Test Movie feature, including the Bandwidth Profiler, which gives you file size and load time statistics as well as a real-time download simulation.
Publishing a Flash movie is quite simple, but the decisions you make in the Publish Settings dialog box may not be. In this lesson you will get an overview of each setting and learn how to make the best choices for your intended platform and audience.
This chapter will cover adding the bells and whistles (almost literally) to your Flash movies. You'll learn how to make your content more engaging by importing sounds or using the built-in sounds provided in the common libraries.
Adding Other Media to Your Movies
Flash offers several ways to incorporate sound into your animations. In this lesson you will see how to add sounds from the common library to a movie.
Adding synchronized sound that plays with an animation, such as a slideshow, can make your movies more entertaining. You will see how to do just that in this video.
Nothing is more fun than triggering a sound with a button. In this video you will see how to add a sound to a mouseover and make the sound stop on a click.
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