Flash Explained

FlashExplained, my most successful website up to date, has been visited by millions of Flash users and web designers over the years. I have reaped considerable success with it. I earned a lot of money, got linked from major web portals like SmashingMagazine and SixRevisions, at one time I even outranked Adobe and still rank for coveted keywords learn flash amongst billions of search results on Google!

How did I do it? You can read it in my new ebook, Earn Money with Educational Websites – A Step-by-Step Guide to Selling Your Knowledge Online! The book contains the experience and knowledge gained from building FlashExplained and other websites and blogs over the span of several years. Find out how:

• I earned more than $1,600 per month from pay-per-click advertising alone
• I learned a painful lesson from Google
• I pulled in 15,000 visitors in less than 12 hours to one of my blogs… and crashed the website
• Got my tutorials used as reference at high schools, colleges and university courses
• Got linked to from some of the world’s leading experts and websites

And I started out Flash some 13 years ago… learning it step by step… later taught it in the best regional IT school and then built Flash Explained from scratch. My success story can be replicated by anyone who’s willing to put in the effort! If you are a web designer, Flash animator, let me tell you – you can succeed too!

Get the book and see my success story:

With this easy lesson, you will learn to make a real-world ad banner in Flash CS4. You will see how to do the following things:

• Create an eye-catching animation,
• Make text messages appear gradually,
• Duplicate scenes to cut working time,
• Make a hyperlinked invisible button and more.

Here is the banner that you are going to learn to create:

I have made metallic buttons in Flash CS4 using the various filters to add effects to buttons’ normal, rollover and clicked states. Here is how they look like:

You can find them in the downloads section.

You can follow Flash Explained on deviantART, at the following address:

flashexplained.deviantart.com

Animations, interfaces and some quick tutorials will be posted there. Enjoy!

With this easy tutorial, I will show you how to make classic tweens in Flash CS4. You are going to learn:

• What are Movie Clip symbols and how to make them
• What is the timeline
• How to make keyframes
• How to make your Movie Clip move, change size and more

Read more…

With this tutorial, I am switching to Flash CS4 and ActionScript 3.0. This lesson will be the first of many in which you will learn how to make animations in Flash CS4. You will see what are shape tweens, motion tweens and classic tweens, with many applications and variations of these basic animation techniques. If you follow through with these lessons, you will learn all that you need to start creating great animations in Flash. So, don’t miss them – subscribe to Flash Explained now.

Let’s start with the simplest animation – the shape tween. In this lesson, you will learn:

• What are keyframes and what is their purpose
• How to use the timeline to create an animation
• How to morph shapes
• How to create smooth looping animations
• How to animate a shape’s color

Read more…

The downloads section has just been added to Flash Explained! In this new section, goodies will be available for download!

For starters, all the lessons on animation in Flash CS3 have been added for you in PDF format! Download them, print them and learn even more easily!

Jump immediately to the new download area on Flash Explained and get the goodies!

Cheers,

Luka

FlashExplained.com has finally been moved onto a new hosting server! In the next few days, you can expect a few disruptions here and there until I tweak all the things necessary for the seamless functioning of the website.

However, the good things you can expect now:

Improved service, because the hosting at mediatemple.net is simply awesome. But…

New Flash tutorials!

There, I said it. I will write and post new Flash lessons. My life has drastically changed in the course of the last year and I have been busy…living! And now it’s time to continue working on Flash Explained. Expect new tutorials in the weeks to come.

Best regards and keep on ActionScripting,

Luka Maras

Hi friends,

It’s been long since I posted anything new. Well, rejoice, for new tutorials are in the works! Also, I’ll be changing the host for flashexplained.com/ because I need something more powerful to handle my 100K+ monthly visits. So don’t sweat it if the site goes down for 1-2 days. It will be back – faster, better and with new features, too. I am planning to add a download section. It will come in handy, you’ll see why.

So, keep on working in Flash and expect new, fresh tutorials coming your way! Thanks for all the e-mails and cool comments. Sorry if I don’t reply to your comments, but I have way too much work to do to be able to handle these.

See you soon in new tuts,

Luka Maras

With this simple and straightforward tutorial, you will learn one very handy animation technique: how to use a motion guide to make an object follow a certain path. I’ll show you:

• How to create a motion guide (inside a guide layer),
• How to make a movieclip follow the motion guide you made,
• How to make the guided animation more realistic and more.

You will be creating a motion tween animation which will then be linked to a motion guide. You can see the kind of animation you are going to make below.