Begin your career as a Flash designer! In this course, you'll learn how to create animated, interactive movies in Flash CS4. These days, Flash movies appear just about everywhere—the Web, the cinema, TV shows and commercials, computer games, and the list goes on. The skills you'll learn in this course will get you started on your way to a rewarding career designing animated graphics and special effects for one of these fun and exciting fields.

Together, we'll develop a fully-functioning Flash application, complete with animation, graphics, and interactive buttons. We'll start by getting familiar with the Flash workspace, creating text and graphics, and animating objects on the Flash movie stage. Then, we'll look in detail at the anatomy of a Flash movie, including how to use the Flash timeline, layers, and frames to control objects and timing on the stage.

While you can produce an entire movie in the Flash software, you'll often need to import graphics, sounds, and digital videos from other applications. As you create your first Flash movie, you'll learn how to format and embed external digital media and how to make them appear or play at specific times. We'll also look at how to control digital media based on specific events, such as end-user mouse clicks.

No course on Flash is complete without an introduction to ActionScript, Flash's powerful programming language. So we'll jump into ActionScript 3.0 by creating interactive buttons. You'll also learn to write scripts that control movie flow as well as scripts that call to and load external videos, Web pages, and other Flash movie files.

As we develop our movie, we'll practice making and animating 3-D objects, syncing sounds with animations, and publishing Flash movies to the Web. By the end of the course, you'll know how to use the Adobe Flash CS4 software to create and publish movies and applications, and you'll be well on your way to becoming a Flash designer!

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Syllabus:

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Week One

Wednesday - Lesson 01

Many people think of Adobe Flash as animation software, but it's much more than that. Flash is the industry standard for creating animated, interactive movies and applications. It's also widely used in TV commercials and cinema special effects. In our first lesson, you'll begin by getting acquainted with the Flash interface, or workspace. Then, I'll show you how to create your first animated graphic. Whether you've worked with Flash a bit before or this is your first time opening the program, you'll be amazed at what you can do by the end of this lesson.

Friday - Lesson 02

Flash comes with everything you need to create complete interactive movies and applications, including a palette of tools for drawing lines and shapes. Today you'll learn how to draw rectangles, circles, and lines to create a framework for a Flash movie. I'll show you how to change line and fill properties, and how to apply special effects such as drop shadows and gradient fills to the objects you draw. You'll also learn how to arrange and distribute objects on the Flash Stage with the tremendously useful Align panel.

Week Two

Wednesday - Lesson 03

Nearly every Flash movie calls for some kind of text—such as buttons, headlines, captions and taglines. In this lesson, I'll show you how to use Flash's Text tool to create basic text. Then we'll apply all kinds of formatting options and special effects, such as colors, drop shadows and bevels, to make the text more interesting and appealing. The text you create in this lesson will become the buttons, headlines, and captions for an ongoing movie project during the remainder of the course.

Friday - Lesson 04

In Flash and other animation programs, events happen over time. Flash measures time in frames on a grid called a Timeline. Today you'll learn how the Timeline works. We'll use it and Flash's Layers feature to distribute and animate several objects on the Stage. We'll animate our buttons and graphics so that they fade onto the Stage at different intervals in our movie. You'll also see how to use Flash's tweens (automatic animation creation tools) to change objects' shapes or make them move frame-by-frame on the Stage. By the end of this lesson, you'll understand the basics of animation in Flash.

Week Three

Wednesday - Lesson 05

As your ongoing movie grows in file size and length, you'll find that breaking it into logically organized scenes makes it easier to work with. This time, I'll show you how to create new scenes. Then, we'll look at importing elements from other programs, such as Photoshop and Word. Most of the movies people create in Flash contain objects created in external graphics programs. You'll learn the basics of bitmap and vector graphics formatting so that using these objects in Flash movies is a lot easier.

Friday - Lesson 06

Ready. Set. Action! You can make your movies more interesting, entertaining, and informative with sound and digital video. While it's relatively easy to import a media file into Flash, getting the results you want is not so straightforward. In this lesson, I'll tell you what you need to know about sound and digital video file formats. Then, we'll look at how to make sounds play. You'll discover how to create ambient backgrounds for your movies and how to make sounds play on specific events, such as mouse clicks.

Week Four

Wednesday - Lesson 07

To produce applications in Flash, you must know how to create interactivity—or how to tell the movie what to do when a user clicks a button. Today, you'll see how to use ActionScript 3.0, Flash's powerful programming language, to make your buttons work. We'll look at basic programming concepts, and then we'll write some scripts that make our buttons hot and our movie interactive. When we finish, you'll have created a complete Flash movie with working button sound effects and user navigation.

Friday - Lesson 08

ActionScript 3.0 is the backbone for creating sophisticated Flash movies. In this lesson, we'll look deeper into programming with ActionScript. You'll learn how to create buttons that allow the user to control animation, and we'll create a short movie that lets users view products online in various colors. Since we're venturing into more advanced Flash topics, we'll also take a look at creating and manipulating 3-D graphics in Flash. Finally, you'll learn how to create complex animations with Flash's Motion Editor.

Week Five

Wednesday - Lesson 09

If you've watched a few Flash movies, you've probably noticed that many of them have several features in common: progress bars that tell users how long they must wait before the movie starts playing, image galleries for displaying photos and product images, and similar sounds and animations. To save you time when you're creating these common elements, Flash comes with several pre-made components that install these effects for you. You can find thousands of components on the Web, or you can save your own components and use them over and over. Flash also comes with many motion presets that make it easy to create sophisticated animations. Today we'll take a look at using motion presets and creating and saving your own animations for use in multiple movies.

Friday - Lesson 10

Like most high-end software programs, Flash comes with and supports files from many other applications. In this lesson, we'll look at Adobe Media Encoder. Media Encoder is a nifty little utility that comes with Flash and lets you format video and sound files for Flash movies and other applications, such as YouTube. We'll also explore the tight integration between Photoshop and Flash—you'll learn how to work more quickly and efficiently by importing your Photoshop files directly into Flash. We'll even touch on creating Flash movies for cell phones with Adobe Device Central, another cool utility included with Flash.

Week Six

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Flash CS4 has a bunch of great new tools and features that make creating sophisticated graphics effects and complex animations so much easier than in previous versions. Today, we'll look at three of them: the Deco tool, the Spray Brush tool, and the Bone tool. The first two tools create graphics special effects in highly useful and professional-looking patterns. The Bone tool is an animation tool that lets you easily create animations that simulate the movement of humans and animals—things like people walking, animals running, and birds flying. These tools will help you give your movies and animations a polished, professional look.

Friday - Lesson 12

Why should you do all this work to create interactive movies if you can't share them with the world? In your final lesson, you'll find out how to publish your work to the Internet. You'll learn how Web servers work and how to upload files to make your creations public. You'll also have a chance to integrate your movies into Adobe Dreamweaver files and then use that popular application to upload your movies to a public Web server. When you finish this lesson, you'll have successfully joined the elite ranks of Flash designers.

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be William Harrel.

As the owner and operator of The Write Desktop Publisher for more than 20 years, William Harrel was a pioneer in designing Web and print media on computers, a craft known back then as desktop publishing. In addition to running his own design firm, he has also authored or co-authored 18 books on designing print media, animation, and electronic documents--including titles on Photoshop, Acrobat (Acrobat for Dummies), PageMaker, Flash, and several other graphics and publishing packages. He has also written hundreds of magazine articles, ranging in subject from Web and multimedia how-tos, to reviews of all types of software packages, including page layout, graphics, multimedia, and word processing software. His work has appeared in such notable magazines as PC World, Home Office Computing, Compute, Windows Magazine, Publish, Entrepreneur, Home Office, and many others. William Harrel has taught Web design and graphics design applications at California State University, Northridge and several other schools.

Requirements:

Adobe Flash Pro CS4 Windows or Adobe Flash Pro Mac, Adobe Flash Pro CS4 Windows Upgrade or Adobe Flash Pro Mac Upgrade, or any Adobe Creative Suite bundle containing Adobe Flash CS4 are all acceptable (software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins); student discounts are available through specific schools; Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 or Mac OS 10.4, Mac OS 10.5 or Mac OS 10.6; Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader). Artistic ability is not required, just a desire to be creative.

Student Reviews:

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