Duration 3 days

Objectives
This 3-Day course is designed specially for Designers who want get to grips with the Flash MX design environment and with the wide variety of design and interactivity capabilities of Flash to produce engaging online animations and interactive elements. The course will start by covering the basics of the Flash MX environment and workspace; simple animation, navigation on the timeline and use of symbols, buttons, text and movie clips within Flash. We then move on to using sound, video and optionally 3D elements within Flash, coupled with some more advanced animation techniques. We will also cover advanced masking techniques, creating input forms, building a menu system and making frames printable from a web page. Finally we look at some key issues related to publishing movies on the internet to ensure smooth integration, performance and user experience. The approach to this course is very much hands-on, and questions and interaction with the course leader are encouraged to get the best results. On the last day, all the learning will be brought together by building a complete project from scratch, ideally one which forms part of an existing work project.

Requirements
Only a fairly basic knowledge and use of Macromedia Flash MX is assumed as a pre-requisite for successful completion of the course.


Course Outline

Animation Techniques
• Fames, Keyframes and Tweening
• Shape Tweens
• Library Symbols and Instances
• Motion Tweens

Working with Libraries and Symbols
• Graphic Symbols
• Button Symbols
• MovieClip Symbols
• Using Libraries
• The Movie Explorer

Simple Interactivity: Navigation
• Labelling the timeline
• Creating and Using buttons
• About actionscript and interactivity
• Adding Actionscript to the timeline
• Adding Actionscript to a Button
• Linking to Labels and a URLs

Importing Bitmaps and Graphics
• Vector vs Bitmap Files
• Importing Bitmap Graphics
• Tracing Bitmaps
• Importing Vector Graphics

Importing Sound to your Movie
• About Sound in Flash
• Streaming and Event Sounds
• Importing and Trimming Sound
• Starting and stopping sounds

Adding Video to your Movie
• About Video in Flash MX
• Importing Video
• The Sorenson Spark Codec
• Tips for using Video in Flash MX

Advanced Animation Techniques
• Circular Animation and motion guides
• Tweening Animations
• Frame-by-Frame animation
• Reversing Animations
• Circular Animation
• Controling Playback Speed
• Creating MovieClip vs Graphic symbol animations

Using 3D in Flash
• About 3D in Flash
• Bandwidth Considerations
• Creating content: Swift 3d
• Importing and Optimising in Flash MX
• Re-using 3D animation in Flash MX
• Triggering 3D interactively

Advanced Navigation: Building a Menu System
• Menus and usability
• Creating a drop-down menu
• Using Rollovers effectlvely within buttons
• The Button Hit Area

The Flash MX workspace
• The Flash MX Interface
• The Tool Bar
• The Timeline
• The Library
• Scenes

Advanced Graphics: Using Masking Techniques
• About Masking
• Creating a Simple Mask
• Animating a Mask

Creating Printable Movies
• About Printing From Flash MX movies
• Designating Which Frames will Print
• Print Area: Movie Bounding Box
• Print Area: Composite Movie Bounding Boxes
• Print Area: Individual Frames
• Disabling Printing
• Adding Print Actions

Loading Movies Dynamically
• Scenes vs external movies
• Making a pre-loader scene
• Making a pre-loader movie
• Loading movies interactively

Creating Forms in Macromedia Flash
• About Forms
• Creating Input Text Fields on a Form
• Specifying a URL to send data to
• About form Validation
• Adding a submit Button
• Using POST vs GET in Flash MX

Low-bandwidth SWF files
• Using the Bandwidth Profiler
• Using LoadMovie to manage load times
• Using shared Libraries to reduce duplication

Publishing Movies to the Internet
• Publish settings in Flash MX
• Previewing in a browser
• Using the bandwidth profiler
• Flash MX file formats
• Optimisation techniques

Detecting the Flash Plug-in in a Browser
• The Dreamweaver Flash Detection Behaviour
• Why do we need to detect the Flash Player?
• Creating a Flash detection swf
• Specifying a Macromedia Flash Content URL
• Specifying an Alternate Non-Flash URL
• Specifiying the Macromedia Flash Requirement

Bringing it all together: a mini Project
• Choosing the right Skipton project
• Designing and Specifying the project
• Hands-on: buidling the project
• Hands-on: testing the project

Wrap-up
• Q and A
• Flash MX 2004 Resources