Certificate in Intermediate Flash CS5 Online Course

There are 12 units of study Flash Movie Clip Symbols

Flash supports many ways to accomplish essentially the same tasks. Depending on your movie’s purpose and overall design, some techniques are much more suited to specific applications than others. In today’s lesson we’ll look at Movie Clip symbols—a powerful and efficient tool for creating rich content. While learning to create Movie Clips, we’ll go over some of Flash’s basic design and interactivity features, just to make sure we all start the course with a similar set of skills. Get ready to dive headlong into Flash’s intermediate-to-advanced movie design techniques.

Inner Pop-ups With UILoader

A design effect that at first looks complicated is the inner pop-up—a pop-up that loads and plays external content within the main movie Timeline. However, as with many techniques in Flash, creating inner pop-ups really isn’t all that difficult, once you know how to do it. While Flash supports many ways to accomplish the inner pop-up effect, an easy and straightforward method is to load and play an external Flash movie in the UILoader component. With UILoader, you can play any Flash SWF movie from your main movie’s Timeline. Designing movies this way helps keep your movies small and reduces download time. It also helps keep your main movie’s Timeline simple and easy to manage.

Creating a Portfolio With ActionScript

As you tackle more sophisticated Flash movies and applications, the method of laying components out frame-by-frame on the Timeline simply won’t cut it. That’s when it’s time to unleash ActionScript 3.0. In this lesson, that’s exactly what we’ll do as we take on a more complicated project: building an online products and services portfolio that can showcase hundreds of products. You’ll learn to make a project of this magnitude manageable by using ActionScript 3.0 to call objects from the Library dynamically—without physically placing and positioning each one on the Stage. You’ll also learn the power of ActionScript classes and variables. By the end of the lesson, you’ll know how to write a single event handler that can call hundreds, even thousands, of external movies to the Stage.

Using an External Script to Design an Interactive Paint Application

In today’s lesson, you’ll learn to use one of the most important tools in complex application design, the external ActionScript file. External ActionScript files not only help keep Flash files small and manageable, but they also expand your design options and can even increase your overall productivity. In this lesson, you’ll learn to write an external ActionScript class file that, when loaded into a Flash movie, will define a new class object. Then you’ll use the new class object to turn the user’s mouse cursor into an interactive paint brush.

Using External Text and Graphics, Trace Statements, and If Conditionals

This lesson takes a straightforward procedure—loading an external image—and turns it into a multifunction chain of events. The simple event handler that loads an external file triggers other events that not only format and apply special effects to the new content, but also manipulate other objects on the Stage. First, you’ll learn how to format external text files with HTML tags and load the text into Flash. Then, you’ll start creating the cascade of events, which includes: using the List component to trigger a function that loads image files; which in turn passes the new content to another function that applies a tween to the images as they display; then the chain continues with simple, powerful If Conditionals that play Movie Clips—all based on the original data passed by the first event in the chain. To make all this possible, you’ll use AS3’s indispensable trace(); statement to find out what data your functions and statements are passing among themselves.

Combining Motion Editor, Timeline, and ActionScript to Create Custom Animations

When it comes to animation, the Motion Editor is one of Flash's most useful features. It allows you to apply multiple transformations and effects all in the same tween. In this lesson, we'll look closely at the Motion Editor, at all its various options and how they work. Next we'll combine several objects containing Motion Tweens to create a sophisticated transition effect and subsequent animation sequence. Then we'll use Flash's built-in Timer to control when our animation sequences play on the Timeline. The resulting movie will be a rotating, never-ending banner similar to those you see on many of today's more popular Web sites.

Special Effects With the Bone Tool, ActionScript, and the Spray Brush Tool

This lesson explores some advanced Bone tool techniques. The Bone tool uses an animation technology known as inverse kinematics (IK), which simulates the movement of animate objects, such as people and animals with skeletal structures. IK is also used in the science of robotics. This lesson assumes some basic experience with IK chains and builds on that experience, teaching you how to modify IK chains to make their movements appear more realistic. We also look at making IK chains interactive, so that your users can manipulate them at runtime. Then, we go animating IK chains with ActionScript. The lesson ends with a short demonstration on using Movie Clip symbols with the Spray Brush tool to create special effects, such as twinkling stars or rotating planets.

Create a Self-Scoring Quiz With External AS3 Class Files

Flash is by far not just an animation program. Many application developers use it to create sophisticated programs that do all sorts of things, such as building online courses, creating shopping carts for online stores, and just about everything else you can think of. In this lesson, we create a self-scoring quiz, or test, where users answer a series of questions and are then given their scores at the end of the test. To accomplish this, we'll revisit the oh-so-powerful external class file, taking the technique further by creating multiple class files that reference one another to make decisions. You'll learn to use several common and highly useful programming concepts, such as Arrays, Sprites, ints, for loops, Boolean operators, radio button groups, and several others. After completing this lesson, you'll have a basic understanding of creating applications with Flash, as well as an all new understanding of the power of ActionScript.

Create an Interactive Web Site With Flash Catalyst

Flash designers typically enjoy creating content in Flash Professional's visually-oriented authoring environment. Many designers do not, however, care for coding, or writing the necessary ActionScript to create interaction. New to the Adobe CS5 suite of applications, Flash Catalyst allows you to create simple, interactive animated interfaces without coding. You design the interaction and animations visually, and Catalyst writes the code for you. This lesson introduces you to Catalyst. We start with an Illustrator artboard, import it into Catalyst, and design a Web interface from the Illustrator content—a completely visual and automated procedure devoid of manual coding. Since Catalyst creates projects compatible with the Flash Platform's Flex environment, this lesson also provides some insight into working with Flex and Flash Builder.

Create Drag-and-Drop, Object Resize, Rotate, and Recolor Interactivity

Many Flash applications, such as games and quizzes, call for advanced user interactivity—providing the user with control of various objects on the Stage. Some movies, for example, call for allowing the user to drag and drop objects, or move them from one spot to another. Other applications call for allowing the user to rotate, resize, and recolor objects. All of this interaction is accomplished with ActionScript. In this lesson, you'll learn to write scripts that turn control over important functions to the user. First, I'll show you a simple set of scripts that allows the user to drag and drop an object on the Stage. Then we'll look at creating sets of buttons that allow users to rotate and resize objects. After that we'll look into allowing users to change not only the color of objects on the Stage, but also the Stage itself—all with the use of a handy little component known as the Color Picker.

Masks, TileList Component, and Animating With Onion Skins

In this lesson, we look at a few of Flash's lesser-known, but highly useful features. First, you'll learn how to create layer masks for producing display effects from objects you draw with Flash's drawing tools. Then, I'll show you how to build an image list—a list consisting of images—with the TileList component. Finally, the lesson ends with an in-depth look at Flash's metaphorical equivalent to the days (not all that long ago) when animations were created one drawing at a time on translucent sheets of paper, stacked one on top of the other—a process known as onion skinning. Flash's Onion Skin feature can help you significantly when developing simple frame-by-frame animations.

Desktop Applications With Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime)

A relatively new addition to the Flash platform, Adobe AIR allows you to create stand-alone desktop applications with Flash Professional—fully functional applications that access and utilize system resources, such as the clipboard, system menus, Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons, print functions, and many others. AIR applications are platform-neutral, meaning that you or your users can install them on any Windows, Mac OS, or Linux computer. Any existing Flash movie can be published as an AIR application. In this lesson, you learn how to create system-level functionality (unavailable in Flash documents destined for Flash Player), and how to publish and install AIR applications—yet one more way you can utilize and capitalize on your Flash skills.