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Welcome to DaVE - Digital and Virtual Environments
... Being Flash with Interactivity ..... a short synopsis

You will need to register to participate and gain access to the extra resources for these virtual courses.

(available as a 3 day workshop and as an online course)

Macromedia Flash is the professional standard authoring tool for producing high-impact interactive Web experiences or lessons.

Flash lets you create interactive movies, in which your audience can use the keyboard or the mouse to jump to different parts of a movie, move objects, enter information in forms, and perform many other operations.

Flash movies are graphics, text, animation, and applications for Web sites. They consist primarily of vector graphics, but they can also contain imported video, bitmap graphics, and sounds. Flash movies can incorporate interactivity to permit input from viewers, and you can create nonlinear movies that can interact with other Web applications.

Animation in Flash

Using Flash, you can animate objects to make them appear to move across the Stage and/or change their shape, size, colour, opacity, rotation, and other properties. You create animation in a Flash document by changing the contents of successive frames. You can create frame-by-frame animation, in which you create a separate image for each frame. You can also create tweened animation, in which you create the first and last frames of an animation and direct Flash to create the frames in between. You can make an object move across the Stage, increase or decrease its size, rotate, change colour, fade in or out, or change shape. Changes can occur independently of, or in concert with, other changes.

The Stage and workspace

Like films, Flash movies divide lengths of time into frames. The Stage is where you compose the content for individual frames in the movie.

Scenes

To organize a movie thematically, you can use scenes. For example, you might use separate scenes for an introduction, a loading message, and credits.

You can add, delete, duplicate, rename, and change the order of scenes.

To stop or pause a movie after each scene, or to let users navigate the movie in a nonlinear fashion, you use actions.

Using the Timeline

The Timeline organizes and controls a movie's content over time in layers and frames. Like films, Flash movies divide lengths of time into frames. Layers are like multiple film strips stacked on top of each other, each containing a different image that appears on the Stage. The major components of the Timeline are layers, frames, and the playhead.

Layers in a document are listed in a column on the left side of the Timeline. Frames contained in each layer appear in a row to the right of the layer name. The Timeline header at the top of the Timeline indicates frame numbers. The playhead indicates the current frame displayed on the Stage.

The Timeline status display at the bottom of the Timeline indicates the selected frame number, the current frame rate, and the elapsed time to the current frame.

Frames and Keyframes

A keyframe is a frame in which you define a change in an animation or include frame actions to modify a movie. Flash can tween, or fill in, the frames between keyframes to produce fluid animations. Because keyframes let you produce animation without drawing each frame, they make creating movies easier. The order in which frames and keyframes appear in the Timeline determines the order in which they are displayed in a movie. You can arrange keyframes in the Timeline to edit the sequence of events in a movie.

Layers

Layers are like transparent sheets of acetate stacked on top of each other. Layers help you organize the artwork in your document. You can draw and edit objects on one layer without affecting objects on another layer. Where there is nothing on a layer, you can see through it to the layers below.

When you create a new Flash document, it contains one layer. You can add more layers to organize the artwork, animation, and other elements in your document.

Previewing movies in the authoring environment

To preview movies, you use commands in the Control menu, buttons on the Controller, or keyboard commands.

Assets and asset management

Most Flash assets are objects on the Stage or symbols stored in the document's library. Other assets include files on local or remote computers. The library makes organization easier and helps optimize file size. The toolbox, inspectors, panels, and library work help you work efficiently with the assets of any document, whether simple or complex.

Symbols and instances

Symbols are reusable elements that you use with a document. Symbols can include graphics, buttons, video clips, sound files, or fonts. When you create a symbol, the symbol is stored in the file's library. When you place a symbol on the Stage, you create an instance of that symbol.
Symbols reduce file size because, regardless of how many instances of a symbol you create, Flash stores the symbol in the file only once. It is a good idea to use symbols, animated or otherwise, for every element that appears more than once in a document. You can modify the properties of an instance without affecting the master symbol, and you can edit the master symbol to change all instances.

Panels

Panels in Flash help you view, organize, and change elements in a document. The options available on panels control the characteristics of symbols, instances, colours, type, frames, and other elements. Panels let you work with objects, colours, text, instances, frames, scenes, and entire documents. To view the complete list of panels available in Flash, see the Window menu.
Most panels include a pop-up menu with additional options. The options menu is indicated by a control in the panel's title bar.

Using the Property inspector

The Property inspector simplifies document creation by making it easy to access the most commonly used attributes of the current selection, either on the Stage or in the Timeline. You can make changes to the object or document attributes in the Property inspector without accessing the menus or panels that contain these features.
Depending on what is currently selected, the Property inspector displays information and settings for the current document, text, symbol, shape, bitmap, video, group, frame, or tool. When two or more different types of objects are selected, the Property inspector displays the total number of objects selected.

The Property inspector displaying text options

Using the toolbox

The tools in the toolbox let you draw, paint, select, and modify artwork, as well as change the view of the Stage. The toolbox is divided into four sections:

• The Tools section contains drawing, painting, and selection tools.
• The View section contains tools for zooming and panning in the application window.
• The Colours section contains modifiers for stroke and fill colours.
• The Options section displays modifiers for the selected tool, which affect the tool's painting or editing operations.

Context menu for a selected frame displayed by right clicking Flash drawing and painting tools
Flash provides various tools for drawing freeform or precise lines, shapes, and paths, and for painting filled objects.

Artwork in Flash

Flash provides a variety of methods for creating original artwork and importing artwork from other applications. You can create objects with the drawing and painting tools, as well as modify the attributes of existing objects.

Placing artwork into Flash

Flash recognizes a variety of vector and bitmap formats. You can place artwork into Flash by importing it onto the Stage in the current Flash document or into the library for the current document. You can also import bitmaps by pasting them on the Stage in the current document. All bitmaps that you import directly into a Flash document are automatically added to the document's library.

You can load JPEG files into a movie during runtime using the loadMovie action or method.
Flash imports vector graphics, bitmaps, and sequences of images as follows:

Video
You can import video clips into Flash. Depending on the video format and the import method you choose, you can publish the movie with video as a Flash movie (SWF file) or a QuickTime movie (MOV file).

Sound

Flash offers a number of ways to use sounds. You can make sounds that play continuously, independent of the Timeline, or you can synchronize animation to a sound track. You can add sounds to buttons to make them more interactive, and make sounds fade in and out for a more polished sound track.

There are two types of sounds in Flash: event sounds and stream sounds. An event sound must download completely before it begins playing, and it continues playing until explicitly stopped. Stream sounds begin playing as soon as enough data for the first few frames has been downloaded; stream sounds are synchronized to the Timeline for playing on a Web site.

Text

You can include text in your Flash movies in a variety of ways. You can create text blocks containing static text, text whose contents and appearance you determine when you author the movie. You can also create dynamic or input text fields. Dynamic text fields display dynamically updating text. Input text fields allow users to enter text for forms, surveys, or other purposes.

Types of symbol behaviour

Each symbol has a unique Timeline and Stage, complete with layers. When you create a symbol you choose the symbol type, depending on how you want to use the symbol in the movie.

Use graphic symbols for static images and to create reusable pieces of animation that are tied to the Timeline of the main movie.

Use button symbols to create interactive buttons in the movie that respond to mouse clicks, rollovers or other actions.

Use movie clip symbols to create reusable pieces of animation. Movie clips have their own multiframe Timeline that plays independent of the main movie's Timeline—think of them as mini-movies inside a main movie that can contain interactive controls, sounds, and even other movie clip instances.

Animation overview

You create animation in a Macromedia Flash MX document by changing the contents of successive frames. You can make an object move across the Stage, increase or decrease its size, rotate, change colour, fade in or out, or change shape. Changes can occur independently of, or in concert with, other changes.
There are two methods for creating an animation sequence in Flash: tweened animation, and frame-by-frame animation. In tweened animation, you create starting and ending frames and let Flash create the frames in between. Flash varies the object's size, rotation, colour, or other attributes evenly between the starting and ending frames to create the appearance of movement. In frame-by-frame animation, you create the image in every frame.

About frame rates

The frame rate, the speed at which the animation is played, is measured in number of frames per second. A frame rate that's too slow makes the animations appear to stop and start; a frame rate that's too fast blurs the details of the animation. A frame rate of 12 frames per second (fps) usually gives the best results on the Web.

Publishing overview

When you're ready to deliver your movie to an audience, you can publish the Flash document (FLA file) for playback. By default, the Publish command creates the Flash SWF file and an HTML document that inserts your Flash movie in a browser window.