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Chapter 2 Your Basic Flash In This Chapter Examining the big picture Setting movie properties Getting graphics Using templates Printing your movie This chapter starts with an overview of the process of creating animation in Flash. We then discuss some tools and features that are fundamental to using Flash efficiently. As you find out in this chapter, you use movie properties to set the screen size and color, frame rate, and measurement units for the Flash movie as a whole. We also discuss the Library and how it s a storehouse for images, symbols, and sound. Templates enable you to create great movies without much work. Finally, near the end of this chapter, we explain how you can print a Flash movie. Looking at the Big Picture When you use Flash to create animation for your Web site, you generally go through several steps of construction. The steps might vary in their order, depending on your situation. After you know the basics, you can start getting creative and make your Web site rock. Here s a typical path to add animation to an existing Web page: 1. Think about it. Noodle around, maybe make some doodles on a napkin, collect a few ideas, and choose one or all of them. 2. Set up your movie. Flash lets you choose the size and color of the Stage, the speed of animation (number of frames per second), and other general parameters that affect the entire Flash movie. See the next section of this chapter for details.
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30 Part I: A Blast of Flash
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Figure 1-6: The Movie of the Year animation in detail. Chapter 1: Getting Aquainted with Flash 8 29
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3. Click the HTML tab. 4. Deselect the Loop check box in the Playback section. We want the animation to play only once. 5. Click the Publish button and then click OK to close the dialog box. With scarcely a blip, Flash publishes your movie and creates two files, one named Movie of the Year.swf (assuming you used that name) and Movie of the Year.html. They re in the same folder as your .fla movie file. Movie of the Year.swf is the file that your browser reads to play the animation. Movie of the Year.html contains the HTML code required to display your movie on a Web page. 6. Open your Web browser. 7. Choose File.Open (or Open File) and find Movie of the Year.html (or whatever you named your movie file). You might need to click Browse and navigate to the file. 8. Double-click the file. Your browser opens the HTML document and reads its instructions to play the Flash movie. 9. Sit back and watch it roll. Don t blink or you ll miss it. (If you do miss it, click the Refresh or Reload Current Page button in your browser.) You can see the movie in Figure 1-6. 10. When you finish watching the movie, close your browser. You can find the Movie of the Year files (.fla, .html, and .swf) in the Ch01 folder on this book s Web site, www.dummies.com/go/flash8. Exiting Flash When you finish creating something in Flash, choose File.Exit (Windows) or choose Flash.Quit (Mac). 28 Part I: A Blast of Flash
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12. Click the first frame of any layer. Your screen should look like the one shown in Figure 1-5. 13. Press Enter (Return) and watch the animation. (Start writing your Academy Awards acceptance speech.) 14. Save your movie again by choosing File.Save. Publishing your first animation for posterity You can t watch the animation in a Web browser until you publish it and insert it into an HTML document. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Click the Stage to change the display of the Property inspector. You should see the Settings button next to the Publish label. 2. Click the Settings button in the Property inspector. The Publish Settings dialog box opens. Figure 1-5: Before you run the animation, Rainbow appears to the right and Resources to the left, and the line logo is rotated. Chapter 1: Getting Aquainted with Flash 8 27
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1. If the Property inspector isn t already open, choose Window. Properties.Properties to open it. If the Property inspector is open but collapsed, click the arrow at the left end of its title bar to expand the panel. 2. Select the word Rainbow. Click the first frame of the Timeline in the highlighted row. When you select the word Rainbow, you can tell which layer it is on by looking at the highlighted layer. 3. Press and hold down the Shift key while you drag the word to the right, just off the Stage into the gray area. You might need to use the horizontal scroll bar or choose a lower zoom percentage from the Zoom drop-down list to see the gray area. Pressing Shift keeps the object from moving up or down while you drag to the right. By clicking the first frame and moving the word, you set its position at the beginning of the animation. 4. Click the word Rainbow s layer, anywhere between the first and the 30th frame. 5. On the Tween drop-down list of the Property inspector, choose Motion. You now see a solid arrow and a light blue color on the Timeline between the first and 30th frames. Choosing Motion from the Tween drop-down list creates animation that moves the symbol from the position in the first frame to its position in the next keyframe, which is frame 30 in this movie. 6. Repeat Steps 2 4 for the word Resources. When you move the word Resources, hold down the Shift key and drag the word to the left, just off the Stage. 7. Select the logo design and click the first frame of the Timeline in the highlighted row. 8. Choose Modify.Transform.Rotate 90 CW to rotate the design 90 degrees clockwise. 9. Repeat the Modify.Transform.Rotate 90 CW command to rotate the design a total of 180 degrees. 10. Click the logo s highlighted layer, anywhere between the first and 30th frames, and choose Motion from the Tween drop-down list of the Property inspector. 11. If necessary, drag the horizontal scroll box until the Stage is in the center of your screen. Otherwise, you won t be able to see the entire animation and you don t want to miss this one! 26 Part I: A Blast of Flash
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1. Click the Selection tool on the Tools panel if it s not already selected. 2. Drag diagonally across the entire logo, including the two words, to select it. You should see two rectangles inside one bigger rectangle. All three objects in the logo are selected. 3. Choose Modify.Timeline.Distribute to Layers. You now have three new layers, named from Symbol 1 through Symbol 3. The three objects of the logo have been distributed to Symbol 1 through 3 and removed from Layer 1. 4. Click outside the Stage to deselect any objects and choose 100% from the Zoom Control drop-down list. You re now ready for the animation process. Making graphics move We explain earlier in this chapter that your goal is to have the word Rainbow fly in from the right and the word Resources to fly in from the left. You also want the graphic to rotate 180 degrees at the same time. What you see now is how the animation will end the last frame of the movie. Follow these steps to create the last frame of the movie and save the file: 1. For each of the three symbol layers, click frame 30 of the Timeline and choose Insert.Timeline.Keyframe. You can find out more about keyframes in Chapter 9. 2. Choose File.Save and pick a location where you save other documents that you create. We don t recommend saving the file in the Flash 8 program folder it might get lost among your Flash program files. 3. Give your movie a name, such as Movie of the Year, and click Save. Flash creates a file named Movie of the Year.fla. Flash adds .fla for you because that s the filename extension for Flash movies. Go back and create the beginning of your movie. Flash can fill in all the blanks in between. Follow these steps to create the beginning of the movie and the animation: Chapter 1: Getting Aquainted with Flash 8 25
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3. Click the upper-right corner of the word Rainbow (just above and to the right of the w) and drag to the lower-left corner of the first letter, R. Dragging from right to left makes it easier to avoid selecting the logo at the same time. You should see the entire word selected. If not, click outside the word and try again. 4. Choose Modify.Convert to Symbol. In the Convert to Symbol dialog box, click Graphic for the behavior and then click OK. It is normally good practice to name the symbol, but not necessary for this exercise. When you click OK, Flash places a box around the word so that you can see that it s one object. 5. Repeat the procedure outlined in Steps 3 and 4 with the word Resources. In this case, you might want to start clicking and dragging from the upper-left area of the word; then choose Modify.Convert to Symbol again and click OK. Now all the letters of the word Resources are a single object. 6. Click the Zoom Control drop-down list and choose 100% so that you can see the entire logo. 7. Click above and to the left of the logo and drag to the lower right to select the entire logo. 8. Hold down the Shift key and click each word to remove both words from the selection. Now the design portion of the logo is selected. 9. Press F8 (the keyboard shortcut to create a symbol) and click OK in the Convert to Symbol dialog box. Flash creates a symbol from the lines of the logo s design. See Chapter 7 to find out more about what symbols are and how to use them. Symbols are important building blocks in Flash movies. Putting your graphics on layers You need to place different pieces on different layers when you re animating. You use layers to organize your movie and keep shapes separate so that they don t interfere with each other. (See Chapter 6 for the complete story on layers.) To split your three symbols onto three separate layers, you can use a convenient feature of Flash 8: Distribute to Layers. Follow these steps: 24 Part I: A Blast of Flash
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5. Browse the dialog box until you find rainbow.gif in the location where you downloaded it. 6. Click to select rainbow.gif and then click Open. If you have difficulty importing the file, copy it to your hard drive and try Steps 3 5 again. You see the logo on your screen. You need to break the logo into pieces and make it a vector graphic so that you can animate sections of it separately. 7. Choose Modify.Bitmap.Trace Bitmap. The Trace Bitmap dialog box appears. 8. In the Trace Bitmap dialog box, set the color threshold to 100, the minimum area to 1, the curve fit to Pixels, and the corner threshold to Many Corners. Click OK in the Trace Bitmap dialog box. In our example, we chose to use settings that reproduce the bitmap as faithfully as possible. Flash creates a vector graphic and breaks up the graphic into individual components. The entire graphic, however, is selected. 9. Click anywhere outside the graphic to deselect it. You ve got your logo! Now you need to set it up for animation. Turning your objects into symbols In the logo that you imported in the preceding section, each letter is a separate object, which can get pretty confusing. Each line in the logo s design is also separate. But you want your words to stay together and the little design, too. So you must combine each word and the logo into a symbol. A symbol helps keep objects together and is required for some kinds of animation. (See Chapter 7 for the scoop on symbols.) To turn the words and the logo into symbols, follow these steps: 1. To get a better view of your image, click the Zoom Control drop-down list (at the upper-right corner of the Stage area) and choose 200%. If you don t see the Zoom Control drop-down list, choose Window. Toolbars.Edit Bar to display it. Use the scroll bar to scroll the words of the logo into view, if necessary. 2. Click the Selection tool on the Tools panel if it s not already selected. Chapter 1: Getting Aquainted with Flash 8 23
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Suppose that you want the word Rainbow to fly into your page from the right and the word Resources to fly in from the left. At the same time, you want the graphic to rotate 180 degrees. The following section shows you how to create this animation. Creating flashy drawings You can use Flash to create a company logo, but importing one from this book s Web site is simpler. Often, you import existing graphics (such as a company logo) from a file rather than create them from scratch. (Chapter 3 explains how to import and manipulate graphics.) If you re going through the steps and make a mistake, choose Edit.Undo (or press Ctrl+Z/ +Z) and try again. You can use Undo repeatedly to undo several steps, if necessary. To import the Rainbow Resources logo into Flash, follow these steps. (The steps might vary if you re importing some other graphic in a different format.) 1. Start Flash. See the instructions in the section Starting Flash on a PC or Starting Flash on a Mac, earlier in this chapter, if you need help. 2. Choose Flash Document from the Create New section of the Startup screen. You see a spanking-new movie on your screen. 3. Go to www.dummies.com/go/flash8 and download the rainbow.gif file. 4. Choose File.Import.Import to Stage. The Import dialog box opens. Figure 1-4: A company logo that could stand some animation. 22 Part I: A Blast of Flash
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