Macromedia Flash Overview

Macromedia Flash MX 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. Web designers use Flash to create navigation controls, animated logos, long-form animations with synchronized sound, and even complete, sensory-rich Web sites. Flash movies use compact vector graphics, so they download rapidly and scale to the viewer's screen size.

Flash documents, which have the .fla filename extension, contain all the information required to develope, design, and test interactive content. Flash documents are not the movies the Flash Player displays. Instead, you publish your FLA documents as Flash movies, which have the .swf filename extension and contain only the information needed to display the movie.

For an interactive introduction to Flash, choose Help>Lessons>Getting Started with Flash.

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 tools, as well as modify the attributes of existing objects.

You can also import vector graphics, bitmap graphics, and video from other applications and modify the imported graphics in Flash. See "Using Imported Artwork and Video" under Help>Using Flash. You can also import sound files, as described in "Importing Sounds" under Help>Using Flash.

Using Flash, you can animate objects to make them appear to move across the Stage and/or change their shape, size, color, opacity, rotation, and other properties. 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.

The complete first quarter will be all about learning the basics of Macromedia Flash. As mentioned, we are currently using Macromedia Flash MX. Students will learn how the entire Flash Stage is setup, what each section of the Stage is used for, and how to modify the properties of the Stage to fit the designers comfort.

The second quarter is all about actionscripting in Flash movies. Actionscripting is the actual programming of the movie where the designer will be telling the movie how to act to certain commands or movements.

You can download a 30 day trial of Macromedia 8 from here. This is the latest version and has some additional features. Try it out and if you are interested in purchasing the full version you can order it from within the Flash application.