Introduction to Flash

A Metaphor

A movie production house

The performance stage(Stage)

Writer’s lounge,Casting couch,Make-up room(Tool palette)

Editing room(Timeline area)

Audience (user)

Library(Library)

Definitions Stage is the rectangular area where you place graphic content,

including vector art, text boxes, buttons, imported bitmap graphics or video clips, and so on.

Symbol is a reusable graphics or movie clips stored in the Library. A symbol has a single master definition in each movie. You can place a symbol, then called Instance, on the stages as

many times as you want. Any time the master symbol is changed, all of the instances to it change.

Symbols can consist of multiple frames, so they can be mini-animations.

Symbols also are used to define buttons. For further information, access

http://resources.emb.gov.hk/flashmx/English/Basic_Level/ch1.1/step.html

Flash is a drawing tool (vector graphics)

Flash has all the basic drawing tools for creating and modifying any artwork.

The drawing can work independently and can be saved as common graphics formats such as wmf, eps, bmp, gif, jpg and png.

Drawing with Flash

Flash As A Drawing Tool

Flash creates animations Animations are graphics or images ch

anging over time for a fraction of a second. Flash uses Timeline to organize and control a sequence of graphics or images over time in layers and frames.

Layers are like multiple film strips stacked on top of one another, each containing a different image that appears on the Stage.

These individual graphics or images are referred to as frames. For film, frames are small pieces of slides on the movie film reel.

Keyframe is a frame in which you define a change in an animation.

For further explanations access, http://resources.emb.gov.hk/flashmx/English/Basic_Level/ch2.1/step.html and

http://resources.emb.gov.hk/flashmx/English/Basic_Level/ch2.2/step.html

Create Animations To create a smooth animati

on, we need to draw at least 12 (due to the persistence of vision of human eye) in-between graphics or images.

Flash can generate Tweened or in-between frames.

These frames can be automatically generated as part of tweening. They are defined using key frames and by choosing Tweening from the Frame pop-up.

Types of Flash Animations

Creating Frame by Frame Tweening – Frames generated between 2 key-frame

s Motion tweenings

Shows continuous motion of the object from initial position to final position

require the corresponding objects to be grouped Tweening along a Path

Same as motion tweening except that user can define the path of the motion

Shape Tweening Change from initial shape/colour to final

Enjoy Your Flash Trip!