adobe flash cs5 on demand part 2 docx

8 Chapter 1 Before you begin to create a movie in Flash, it's important to develop a project plan first.. The storyboard follows the script and develops visual frames of the movie's mai

6 Chapter 1

Tools Panel

Contains drawing and other related tools to create and manipulate graphics.

Property Inspector

Displays information about the properties and attributes of tools and graphic elements

Viewing the Flash Window

Panel Windows

Gives you access to authoring tools and attribute settings for elements.

Welcome

screen

Provides

easy access

links to

create and

open Flash

documents.

From the Library of Wow! eBook

Document Window

Displays open Flash

documents, which include an

Edit bar, Timeline and Stage.

Edit Bar

Displays what editing mode you are working in and allows you to switch scenes.

Stage

Provides a place to compose the content for individual frames, which includes drawing artwork

or arranging imported graphics

Timeline

Gives you a visual

represent-ation of every frame, layer and

scene in the document

8 Chapter 1

Before you begin to create a movie in Flash,

it's important to develop a project plan first

The project plan provides a site map for you

to follow as you build your project in Flash

Without a project plan, you'll inevitably hit

road blocks, which will cause you to waste

time redesigning all of or portions of the

movie Planning a movie project involves

determining its purpose, identifying the

audi-ence, logically developing the content,

organ-izing the structure of the content, developing

the layout and design, and identifying the

delivery computer system With a project

plan in place, you'll be ready to create a

movie in Flash

Plan a Movie

Creating a movie can take a long time; it's

worth the effort to plan carefully The

ten-dency for most first-time Flash developers is

to start creating a movie without carefully

planning the project Before you begin, you

need to develop and follow a plan Otherwise,

you might end up spending a lot of time

fix-ing or completely changfix-ing parts of the

movie, which you could have avoided from

the beginning You need to figure out the goal

of the project, the look and feel of your

pro-duction, its length and size, how it will

inter-act with the viewer, and how and for whom it

will be distributed

When planning a movie, it's important to

accomplish the following:

Determine the purpose

Is it for training? Sales? Entertainment?

Informing? The answer will determine the

types of features you may want to include or

exclude in the movie If the purpose is to

cre-ate a training site, you might want to include

simple navigation, easy-to-use instructional

material, and a help system On the other

hand, if the purpose is to create a sales pro-motion, you might want to include eye-catch-ing graphics, videos, and audio to get users' attention and draw them into the presenta-tion

Identify the audience

How you create your movie will depend on how you classify the intended audience If the intended audience consists of novice com-puter users, you will have to concentrate on making the navigational controls and layout

as simple to use as possible If the users are experienced computer users, you can include more advanced features and interactions

Develop the content and organize the structure

The most beneficial planning tools for the multimedia developer are the script and schematic flowchart The script tells the story

of your movie production in text form Just like in the movies, a script is used to describe each section, to list audio or video, and to provide a basis for the text that will appear onscreen Schematic flowcharts are the best way to sketch the navigational structure of a movie and make sure that each of the sec-tions is properly connected After you have the script and schematic flowchart mapped out on paper, you will quickly see the correla-tion between what you have developed and what you will begin to set up in Flash

Develop the layout and design of the movie

The storyboard tells the story of your movie

in visual form It helps you design the layout

of each screen in your movie The storyboard follows the script and develops visual frames

of the movie's main transitional points, which help you develop the Flash media elements

Creating a Project Plan

From the Library of Wow! eBook

you will use to create your movie A

story-board can take a long time to develop, but the

media elements you assemble and create in

the process will shorten the overall

develop-ment time As you develop your layout and

design, be sure to keep:

◆ Navigation easy to understand and

consistent from page to page, such as

navigation bars or drop-down menus

◆ Text easy to read

◆ Sound and animation limited

◆ Movie file sizes as small as possible

for fast downloads Break up large files

into small ones for easy management

◆ Color consistent and appropriate for

the audience

◆ Content accessible to users with visual

or auditory impairments

Identify the delivery computer system and

browser to be used for playback

Some computers are more up-to-date than

others You need to determine the minimum

computer hardware and software require-ments in which your movie will be delivered

The hardware and software requirements will determine what types of media you can use and how the movie will play back

Some hardware requirements you need to consider for the delivery computer system are (1) CPU (central processing unit), which deter-mines the speed with which your computer can compute data; (2) RAM (system memory), which determines how fast files load and how smoothly they run; (3) Sound cards, which determine if you can use sound files; (4) Video cards, which determine the quality and speed

of the graphic and video display, and (5) Monitor resolution, which determines the color display (number of available colors), size (1024 x 768 is typical, while 1440 x 900 is becoming more and more available), and overall look of your movie

Some software requirements you need to consider are the operating system version and supported browser type and version See

“Preparing to Install Flash” on page 2 for spe-cific details about these requirements

10 Chapter 1

After you develop a project plan, you can use

Flash to create a movie according to the plan

Creating a movie involves six main steps:

set-ting up movie properties, assembling media

elements, positioning the media elements on

the Stage and sequencing them in the

Timeline, adding custom functionality and

interactive elements, previewing and testing

the movie, and finally publishing or exporting

the movie for distribution

Build a Movie with Flash

Before you start creating a movie using Flash

based on your project plan, it's important to

understand the process of developing Flash

software The basic steps for developing

inter-active multimedia software with Flash are

listed below

Step 1: Set up document properties

Before you start a Flash project, you need to

create a new document and set up initial

doc-ument properties, such as the user’s viewable

screen size, for how your movie looks and

operates It is important to specify document

property settings that affect the entire movie

at the beginning of the project, such as how

colors are defined and the size and location of

the Stage, so you don't have to redesign the

movie later

Step 2: Create or import media elements

Media elements include graphics, images,

buttons, videos, sounds, and text You can

cre-ate new media elements in Flash or import

ones that have already been developed Flash

provides several tools for creating media

ele-ments, including shape and paint tools, and

text creation tools You can also add media

elements from the Library, a media storage

area Media elements are either static or

dynamic Static media is an element, such as

text or graphics, created or imported into a movie that doesn’t change unless the author makes the change and republishes the movie

Dynamic media is an element, such as data, MP3 sound, a JPEG image, or Flash Live Video (FLV) video, stored outside of the pub-lished movie and loaded when needed or changed by scripting, which makes updating easy, keeps file sizes down, and provides per-sonalized information to the user

Step 3: Position the elements on the Stage and sequence them in the Timeline

The Stage is the viewing area you use to dis-play where media elements appear in a movie, and the Timeline is the area you use to organize what you want to occur at the time and duration you specify You use the Stage to create the look and feel for your production;

you use the Stage and Timeline together to arrange the media elements in space and time The Stage represents the media ele-ments' position in space (where) and the Timeline represents the media elements' position in time (when)

Step 4: Add navigational components, interactive behaviors, and motion effects

Scripting allows you to add custom function-ality to your movie, such as moving objects

on the Stage, formatting text, storing and managing information, performing mathe-matical operations, and controlling the movie

in response to specific conditions and events, such as a mouse click In Flash, scripts are written in ActionScript, a Flash-specific pro-gramming language To help you get started scripting and save you some time, Flash comes with built-in components, and scripts called behaviors Components are elements you can use to quickly create a user interface

For example, components can include

Building a Flash Project

From the Library of Wow! eBook

buttons, arrows, or other navigation elements

that move the viewer to different parts of a

movie or to different locations on the Web

After you add a component, you can use

behaviors to add functionality to the

compo-nent to make it do what you want In addition

to behaviors, you can use built-in Timeline

effects to add motion to elements As you

build in movie navigation and organization,

it’s good design to break up large projects

into smaller movies, which can be quickly

accessed from a main movie This keeps

Internet download times to a minimum, and it

makes projects easier to update, and more

manageable for a team to produce

Step 5: Preview and test the movie

After you create your project, you use one of

the Test Movie commands to preview and test the movie to make sure it runs the way you want it to It's important to test the functional-ity of your movie early and often during the development process to catch problems while they are still minor

Step 6: Publish the document as a movie file for use over the Internet

When the movie runs the way you want it to, you can publish your production as a Flash movie that viewers can play on a Web page, using a browser with the Flash Player Flash publishes the movie file (.swf) and creates an HTML file with information to display the movie file Viewers can't change the movies in the SWF format; they can only play them

Step 2: Create

or import

media

elements

Step 4: Add navigational components,

interactive behaviors, and motion effects

Step 1: Setup

document properties

Step 6: Publish the

document as a movie

Step 5: Preview and test the movie Step 3: Position the elements on the Stage

and sequence them in the Timeline