Begin your career as a Flash designer! In this course, you'll learn how to create animated, interactive movies in Flash CS4. These days, Flash movies appear just about everywhere—the Web, the cinema, TV shows and commercials, computer games, and the list goes on. The skills you'll learn in this course will get you started on your way to a rewarding career designing animated graphics and special effects for one of these fun and exciting fields.
Together, we'll develop a fully-functioning Flash application, complete with animation, graphics, and interactive buttons. We'll start by getting familiar with the Flash workspace, creating text and graphics, and animating objects on the Flash movie stage. Then, we'll look in detail at the anatomy of a Flash movie, including how to use the Flash timeline, layers, and frames to control objects and timing on the stage.
While you can produce an entire movie in the Flash software, you'll often need to import graphics, sounds, and digital videos from other applications. As you create your first Flash movie, you'll learn how to format and embed external digital media and how to make them appear or play at specific times. We'll also look at how to control digital media based on specific events, such as end-user mouse clicks.
No course on Flash is complete without an introduction to ActionScript, Flash's powerful programming language. So we'll jump into ActionScript 3.0 by creating interactive buttons. You'll also learn to write scripts that control movie flow as well as scripts that call to and load external videos, Web pages, and other Flash movie files.
As we develop our movie, we'll practice making and animating 3-D objects, syncing sounds with animations, and publishing Flash movies to the Web. By the end of the course, you'll know how to use the Adobe Flash CS4 software to create and publish movies and applications, and you'll be well on your way to becoming a Flash designer!