Flash CS4, Introduction

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1
Many people think of Adobe Flash as animation software, but it's much more than that. Flash is the industry standard for creating animated, interactive movies and applications. It's also widely used in TV commercials and cinema special effects. In our first lesson, you'll begin by getting acquainted with the Flash interface, or workspace. Then, I'll show you how to create your first animated graphic. Whether you've worked with Flash a bit before or this is your first time opening the program, you'll be amazed at what you can do by the end of this lesson.

Lesson 2
Flash comes with everything you need to create complete interactive movies and applications, including a palette of tools for drawing lines and shapes. Today you'll learn how to draw rectangles, circles, and lines to create a framework for a Flash movie. I'll show you how to change line and fill properties, and how to apply special effects such as drop shadows and gradient fills to the objects you draw. You'll also learn how to arrange and distribute objects on the Flash Stage with the tremendously useful Align panel.

Lesson 3
Nearly every Flash movie calls for some kind of text?such as buttons, headlines, captions and taglines. In this lesson, I'll show you how to use Flash's Text tool to create basic text. Then we'll apply all kinds of formatting options and special effects, such as colors, drop shadows and bevels, to make the text more interesting and appealing. The text you create in this lesson will become the buttons, headlines, and captions for an ongoing movie project during the remainder of the course.

Lesson 4
In Flash and other animation programs, events happen over time. Flash measures time in frames on a grid called a Timeline. Today you'll learn how the Timeline works. We'll use it and Flash's Layers feature to distribute and animate several objects on the Stage. We'll animate our buttons and graphics so that they fade onto the Stage at different intervals in our movie. You'll also see how to use Flash's tweens (automatic animation creation tools) to change objects' shapes or make them move frame-by-frame on the Stage. By the end of this lesson, you'll understand the basics of animation in Flash.

Lesson 5
As your ongoing movie grows in file size and length, you'll find that breaking it into logically organized scenes makes it easier to work with. This time, I'll show you how to create new scenes. Then, we'll look at importing elements from other programs, such as Photoshop and Word. Most of the movies people create in Flash contain objects created in external graphics programs. You'll learn the basics of bitmap and vector graphics formatting so that using these objects in Flash movies is a lot easier.

Lesson 6
Ready. Set. Action! You can make your movies more interesting, entertaining, and informative with sound and digital video. While it's relatively easy to import a media file into Flash, getting the results you want is not so straightforward. In this lesson, I'll tell you what you need to know about sound and digital video file formats. Then, we'll look at how to make sounds play. You'll discover how to create ambient backgrounds for your movies and how to make sounds play on specific events, such as mouse clicks.

Lesson 7
To produce applications in Flash, you must know how to create interactivity?or how to tell the movie what to do when a user clicks a button. Today, you'll see how to use ActionScript 3.0, Flash's powerful programming language, to make your buttons work. We'll look at basic programming concepts, and then we'll write some scripts that make our buttons hot and our movie interactive. When we finish, you'll have created a complete Flash movie with working button sound effects and user navigation.

Lesson 8
ActionScript 3.0 is the backbone for creating sophisticated Flash movies. In this lesson, we'll look deeper into programming with ActionScript. You'll learn how to create buttons that allow the user to control animation, and we'll create a short movie that lets users view products online in various colors. Since we're venturing into more advanced Flash topics, we'll also take a look at creating and manipulating 3-D graphics in Flash. Finally, you'll learn how to create complex animations with Flash's Motion Editor.

Lesson 9
If you've watched a few Flash movies, you've probably noticed that many of them have several features in common: progress bars that tell users how long they must wait before the movie starts playing, image galleries for displaying photos and product images, and similar sounds and animations. To save you time when you're creating these common elements, Flash comes with several pre-made components that install these effects for you. You can find thousands of components on the Web, or you can save your own components and use them over and over. Flash also comes with many motion presets that make it easy to create sophisticated animations. Today we'll take a look at using motion presets and creating and saving your own animations for use in multiple movies.

Lesson 10
Like most high-end software programs, Flash comes with and supports files from many other applications. In this lesson, we'll look at Adobe Media Encoder. Media Encoder is a nifty little utility that comes with Flash and lets you format video and sound files for Flash movies and other applications, such as YouTube. We'll also explore the tight integration between Photoshop and Flash?you'll learn how to work more quickly and efficiently by importing your Photoshop files directly into Flash. We'll even touch on creating Flash movies for cell phones with Adobe Device Central, another cool utility included with Flash.

Lesson 11
Flash CS4 has a bunch of great new tools and features that make creating sophisticated graphics effects and complex animations so much easier than in previous versions. Today, we'll look at three of them: the Deco tool, the Spray Brush tool, and the Bone tool. The first two tools create graphics special effects in highly useful and professional-looking patterns. The Bone tool is an animation tool that lets you easily create animations that simulate the movement of humans and animals?things like people walking, animals running, and birds flying. These tools will help you give your movies and animations a polished, professional look.

Lesson 12
Why should you do all this work to create interactive movies if you can't share them with the world? In your final lesson, you'll find out how to publish your work to the Internet. You'll learn how Web servers work and how to upload files to make your creations public. You'll also have a chance to integrate your movies into Adobe Dreamweaver files and then use that popular application to upload your movies to a public Web server. When you finish this lesson, you'll have successfully joined the elite ranks of Flash designers.