Certificate in Intermediate Flash CS6 Online Course

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Description

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    Course

  • Methodology

    Online

  • Start date

    Different dates available

Start Now To Learn Intermediate Flash CS6 Take your Adobe Flash skills to the next level to create more sophisticated and powerful Flash applications. You'll start by examining the ever-versatile Movie Clip symbol, using it to create Flash content—animations and special effects—inside other Flash content. Then you'll dive deep into ActionScript so you can to turn your simple SWFs into epic Flash masterpieces. For example, you'll learn how to write a single script that controls hundreds, even thousands, of objects based on user input. You'll also learn the advanced ActionScript techniques you'll need to take control of the user's cursor and how to extend Flash's capabilities with external ActionScript Class files. External ActionScript files also allow you to use the same scripts across multiple SWFs, as well as create SWFs that load and interact with other SWFs—the secret to creating in-depth, multifaceted Flash applications. But this course is not just about programming. You'll also learn high-end Motion Editor skills for creating sophisticated transitions and other animated effects. We'll delve deep into advanced Bone tool features that make your IK bones appear more life-like, as well as the Deco tool, Spray Brush tool, Layer Masks, Onion Skins, and other advanced techniques for creating professional-grade graphics and animations. No intermediate Flash course would be complete without lessons on using ActionScript for developing user-interactive courses, surveys, and quizzes—scripts that make decisions, count and keep track of user choices, and then tally up and report the results. In this course you'll learn to compose ActionScripts indispensible to creating these kinds of sophisticated applications. You'll also see how to incorporate all types of content from external applications, such as graphics editors and word processors. We'll try out Edge Animate, Adobe's new no-scripting HTML5-,...

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Start date

Online

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About this course

Entry requirements Students must have basic literacy and numeracy skills. Minimum education Open entry. Previous schooling and academic achievements are not required for entry into this course. Computer requirements Students will need access to a computer and the internet. Minimum specifications for the computer are: Windows: Microsoft Windows XP, or later Modern and up to date Browser (Internet...

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Subjects

  • On-Air
  • Basic
  • ActionScript
  • Basic IT training
  • Flash
  • Animation
  • Basic IT
  • Design
  • Graphics
  • Adobe
  • Image
  • Web
  • Programming
  • Play
  • Skills and Training

Course programme

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 application, 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 websites.

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 to 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 refer to 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.

Creating Alternate Animation and Interactivity in Edge Animate

As computer technology continues to move toward mobile devices, Flash isn't always the best choice for creating simple animation and interactivity. Increasingly, with the maturing of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript Web page description and scripting languages, more and more designers are relying on other technologies. With an eye toward the future, Adobe has developed a new utility—Edge Animate—that, much like Flash Professional, provides a visual design environment for creating animations and interactive interfaces for inclusion in Web pages. Just as Flash Pro lets you lay out your creations visually (and then, when you export your work to SWFs and other formats, the program converts your work to ActionScript), Edge Animate converts what you create visually to HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. In this lesson, we'll take a break from working with Flash and look at creating Web content with Edge Animate. Since Edge Animate relies on Stage and Timeline metaphors, making the transition from Flash to this new platform should come easily to you, providing you with yet another highly useful addition to your design tool belt.

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 applications, 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 over 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 creating 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, as well as most handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablets. 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.

Additional information

Through well-crafted lessons, expert online instruction and interaction with your tutor, participants in these courses gain valuable knowledge at their convenience. They have the flexibility to study at their own pace combined with enough structure and support to complete the course. And they can access the classroom 24/7 from anywhere with an Internet connection.

New sessions of each course run every month. They last six weeks, with two new lessons being released weekly (for a total of 12). The courses are entirely Web-based with comprehensive lessons, quizzes, and assignments. A dedicated professional instructor facilitates every course; pacing learners, answering questions, giving feedback, and facilitating discussions.

Certificate in Intermediate Flash CS6 Online Course

Price on request