Adobe Flash

This course is designed for new users of Flash who wish to create visually engaging rich media content using the powerful design and animation tools available in Flash.

Adobe Flash has become a web standard - fusing the precision and flexibility of vector graphics with animation, interactivity, video and audio to create web content that attracts and engages. With powerful ActionScripting and e-commerce capabilities, Flash is the web design and development tool of the future.

This extremely popular two day course, run through an Adobe authorised training centre, has proved to be the most effective way of getting up and running in Macromedia Flash quickly and easily. This comprehensive course covers the Flash basics, importing, creating and editing vector graphics and working with text as well as creating animations, building a navigational system, creating interactive elements using built-in ActionScript behaviours, incorporating sound and video and publishing and testing your Flash movies.

Day One

FLASH ESSENTIALS

• The Adobe Flash interface
• Customising the interface
• Creating a new Flash document
• Setting stage dimensions
• Working with panels and panel layouts
• Custom panel sets
• Setting preferences
• Identifying the development cycle
• Testing a file

VECTORS AND BITMAPS

• Object and shape draw modes
• Vector draw tools
• Alignment
• Rules, guides and grid
• Working with layers
• Masking techniques
• Gradient colours
• Importing and saving swatches
• Deco tool and custom presets
• Importing bitmaps
• Importing from Photoshop and Illustrator

USING TEXT EFFECTIVELY

• The text engine in Flash (TFL)
• Using the text tool
• Adding and formatting static text
• Anti-alias options
• Font properties
• Using threaded text boxes
• Working with text overflows
• Text effects and filters
• Creating multiple text columns
• Static, input and dynamic text
• Embedded vs device fonts

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Day Two

CREATING ANIMATIONS

• Working with the Timeline
• Using keyframes, and frames
• Cell animation
• Shape tweens
• Classic tweens and Motion tweens
• Easing

MOTION EDITOR ESSENTIALS

• Custom eases
• Symbols: graphic, MovieClip and button
• Library best practice
• The 3D rotation tool
• The 3D translation tool
• Understanding Inverse Kinematics using the Bone tool
• Using Spring to add character to your animations

ADDING SOUND AND VIDEO

• Importing sounds
• Changing sound properties
• Adding sound to a timeline
• Embedding video in a timeline
• The FLVPlayback component

INTERACTIVITY

• About ActionScript
• Applying Actions with Code Snippets
• Frame labels
• Create linear navigation
• Loading external SWF’s
• Exploring the new Code Snippets

PUBLISHING AND TESTING

• Using different publishing formats
• Adding Flash Player detection
• Exporting Sprite Sheets for CSS integration from Flash
• Exporting animations to the HTML5 canvas tag with the Create JS Toolkit extension
• Exploring swf compression for Actionscript 3 and vector graphics
• Exploring AIR runtime support for IOS, Android and desktop
• Testing for mobile devices with the Content Simulator