Adobe Flash Training Course

Adobe Flash Course Contents

Part1: Starting Flash

Introduction to Adobe Flash

• Basic Concepts
• What is Flash?
• Notions of animation and interactivity
• Saving a project (FLA and SWF)
• Launching Flash
• Resetting the workspace
• Exploring the welcome screen
• The Flash files explained
• Creating our first Flash file
• The panels
• Modifying the movie properties
• Saving the file

The Flash Workspace

• The menus, palettes and individual buttons are explained individually
• The Tool Box
• Arrow Tool
• Subselection Tool
• Line Tool
• Lasso Tool
• Pen Tool
• Text Tool
• Oval Tool
• Rectangle Tool
• Pencil Tool
• Brush Tool
• Free Transform Tool
• Fill Transform Tool
• Ink Bottle Tool
• Paint Bucket Tool
• Eyedropper Tool
• Eraser Tool

Animation in Flash

• Flash timeline
• Manipulating layers in Flash
• What are frames?
• Flash tweens motion
• Flash Shape tweens
• Creating a moving
• Playing and publishing a movie
• Text animation in Flash
• Library
• Embedding moving clips in Flash
• Flash media player
• Property inspector

Getting to grips with drawing

• Strokes and fills
• Solving classic problems
• Shape interaction
• Working in a single layer causes its problems
• Accidental fill on fill
• Stroke and fill interactions

Working in layers

• Building new layers
• Locking previous layers to prevent modification
• Hiding and showing layers
• Outline view as an alternative to visibility
• Adding shadows to our design

Spelling it out

• The text tool
• Checking the properties before you type
• Adding our text
• Back to black
• Changing the properties
• Discussing the anti-alias options
• Working with large blocks of text
• An example of text orientation
• Breaking apart text and applying a stroke 

Enhancing the design with images

• A simple import to stage
• Let's take a look at workflow
• A workflow for transparent content
• Working with vector artwork

Being symbolic

• The concept
• Convert to symbol
• Compare and discuss the symbol types
• Look at color effects
• Look at filters
• Reuse is the key
• Blend modes

Using the mask

• Importing an image
• Creating a new layer
• Using the grid fill deco tool
• Turning it into a mask
• Locking layers and preview

Tweening time

• Steps to happiness
• Tweening different properties
• Putting it into practise – let's build a banner
• The magic staircase
• Animating images
• Cache as bitmap
• Exploring easing and breaking up a tween

Publishing your movie

• A quick look at publish settings
• Publishing the movie
• Reviewing the output

The building blocks of a simple microsite

• Building a button
• Duplicating symbols
• Bringing the buttons together
• Using a movieclip for the background
• Sketching out the design

Part2: Advanced Flash

Building our first page

• The home page

Building the other pages

• Using scenes to separate our pages
• Getting the content in the same place
• Duplicating the title symbol object and then swapping it out
• Swapping out the image
• Modifying the layout
• Naming our scenes
• Modifying behaviour with a sprinkling of script
• Adding some code to make the buttons work

Sneaking in a simple preloader

• Adding labels to our frames as anchors
• Changing our publish settings to enable the anchors
• Reviewing the movie and fixing any problems

Introducing interaction

• Movieclips as buttons
• Using this to create popups
• Blend modes and reflections
• Instance names
• Scaling symbols and 9-slice view
• The scroll pane and scrolling content

Frame-by-frame animation

• Illustrator as a tool
• The import process
• Drawn and scanned content
• Import an image series
• Tracing bitmaps and optimising curves

Character animation and the Bones tool

• Importing from Illustrator and movieclips
• Using the Bones tool
• Building a basic animation

Working in 3D

• First, the limitations
• Using perspective to produce a different design
• Gradient styles
• Bitmap fills
• Blend modes to darken into the distance
• Movement in 3D and the motion editor
• Rotation in 3D and the classic problem of completion
• Publish settings and GPU acceleration

Working with XFL

• After effects to Flash workflow and FLV vs XFL
• Indesign to Flash using XFL

Getting it all online

• Using a SWF in a Dreamweaver page
• Window modes and overlapping divs
• The code produced by Flash and how to use it

The Flash project

• Creating a project
• Separating content into separate SWFs
• The uiloader component
• Backgrounds and 9-slice scaling
• Libraries and runtime sharing

Building navigation

• Movieclips as buttons
• Frame labels
• Audio on our buttons and runtime sharing
• Grouping buttons as a navigation bar
• Filters revisited
• Instance names
• Accessibility on our buttons
• Applying a document class to intercept interaction

Develop workflow

• Planning and communication
• The initial design prototype and the first development meeting
• Symbol names and types
• Instance names
• 'Export for ActionScript' and eloquent structure

Flash Adobe Certified Associate exam

• Preparation
• Practice exam
• Flash Adobe Certified Associate exam

Projects in Adobe Flash Course

Project1: Banner adverts

• Dimensions and file sizes
• Working our graphics before use
• The Kuler extension
• Motion tweening with the motion editor and easing
• Duplicating motion to a second symbol
• Motion presets
• Mask layers and movieclips in retrospect

Project2: Banner advert clicktags

• The theory of banner advert providers
• An insight into the HTML
• Applying a document class to our banner
• Viewing the example online

Project3: Back to banners

• Banner advert sizes
• Let's build a banner to brush up our skills
• Alphas, movement, scale, blur
• Placing backgrounds and borders on our banner
• Advertisement text
• Transparent corners
• Creating movieclips in retrospect
• Masking revisited
• Using a mask in an animation
• How to add a simple link

Project4: A preloader

• Movie structure
• 'Export for ActionScript3'
• Looking at the bandwidth profiler
• Adding a preloader scene
• Changing the compiler settings
• Using the deco tool to produce a preloader animation
• Linking to our document class
• Testing the movie and simulating the download

Project5: A progress bar

• The progress bar plan
• Working in layers
• Instance names and registration points
• Masks can make things look great!
• Clever looping animation
• Using and naming our progress bar
• Linking to the class definition
• Testing the movie and simulating the download

Project6: A photo gallery

• The prototype sketch
• Preparing our photos using batch processing
• Writing an XML file
• Building our Flash movie
• Creating dummy movieclips
• Dynamic text and embedding fonts
• Adding backgrounds and borders
• Linking in our document class
• Testing the movie and simulating the download

Project7: A presentation

• Working with scenes
• Adding some animation
• Playing it through
• It would be nice to have some control and applying our code from the developer
• Exploring the functionality

Project8: A simple tabbed view

• Building our tabs
• Building our pages
• Naming the instances
• Linking the pages and tabs to the base class
• Enabling the component definitions
• Viewing the component inspector
• Setting the parameters
• Testing the movie

Project9: An MP3 player

• Building our individual components, play/pause, volume control, volume display, mute control, song title preview, player background and frequency analyser
• Bringing them together and naming the instances
• Linking our MP3 player to the developer's code
• Enabling the component definition
• Drag and drop the component into the design
• Use the component inspector to set the MP3 filename

Project10: An e-book

• Building our individual components
• Arrows, zoom in, zoom out, page number display, e-book logo, footer bar, background, e-book dummy, individual pages and e-book pages collection
• Bringing them together and naming the instances
• Linking the document to our developer's code
• Testing the movie and exploring the functionality

Project11: A 3D loader for product visualisation

• Building a dummy placeholder
• Linking to the developer's code
• Enabling the component definition
• Adding the component to the movie
• Setting the 3D filename in the component inspector
• Testing the movie and exploring the functionality

Project12: Create a complete website in Flash

The home page

• Static text and anti-aliasing
• Importing an image for use
• Converting to a movieclip to apply a filter
• Introducing dynamic text
• Fixing the size and making it scrollable
• Adding the all important scroll bar
• Making our text and images accessible
• Considering localisation of content

The about page

• Working in the library
• Producing more interesting content
• Don't forget accessibility and localisation
• Using the scroll pane to make it scroll

The contact page

• Using scenes for navigation
• Building a more interesting navigation bar with images
• Applying a class to our buttons
• Duplicating the scenes
• Applying a document class to resolve navigation
• Importing images
• Making the map more exciting with a component
• Building a form to collect information
• The importance of instance names

Publishing and previewing our microsite

• Reviewing the publish settings
• Publishing the movie
• Viewing in the browser