Flash Explained

This lesson will be the first in a series where all the animation techniques in Flash CS3 will be explained in detail. Motion tween animation is one of the most widely used in Flash, so it makes sense to begin with it. You are going to learn:

• How to draw a basketball using the great drawing tools available,
• How to create a movieclip symbol, which is a must for any motion tween animation,
• How to create keyframes,
• How to create easing effect for better realism and more.

You can see the example of the animation you are going to create below. It is the classic example: an animated, bouncing ball.

In this easy lesson made for Flash 8 professional I will show you how to create a set of cool, neon glow playback control buttons easily. No other applications will be used to create these buttons, because Flash has so much power on its own! You will see:

• How to use the basic shapes to create the ones you need,
• How to use the great blending filters in Flash 8 pro,
• How to combine multiple filters and objects stacked upon one another, and some more.

You can see the example of the sleek buttons below.

In this easy, detailed Flash 8 pro lesson I will show you how to make a sleek green sphere preloader for your website. In this lesson, you will learn:

• How to create a sphere with a realistic depth effect,
• How to use the great filters in Flash 8 pro to achieve a realistic sphere,
• How to use transparency combined with radial gradient fills in Flash,
• How to create a beveled ring around your preloader,
• How to create a dynamic text field with pixel fonts and extra effects added to it,
• How to load an external SWF and more.

Below is an example of how your preloader will look like at the end of this lesson. This is a simulation of course, no real preloading is happening in the example.

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In this easy tutorial made for Flash 8 I will show you how to create a set of cool drop-down menus for your Flash website. You will see and learn:

• How to create a generic menu button and prepare it for dynamic use,
• How to use a loop to create the main horizontal menu bar,
• How to dynamically assign labels to buttons in a snap,
• How to change the color of your menu with just a couple of lines of ActionScript code,
• How to create a drop-down menu for each main link and make it interactive and much more!

You can see the live Flash example of the menu that you are going to create in this tutorial below. The contents of the website are dummy contents, of course, made just for this tutorial.

In this easy Flash 8 Pro lesson, I will show you how to make a cool 3-D logo in a few easy steps. You will see:

• How to make primary vector shapes from static text field,
• How to apply a gradient fill to all the letters evenly,
• How to make create a 3-D effect with your text by distorting it and putting it into perspective,
• How to apply a drop shadow effect to the logo to add more depth to it and more.

You can see the final result below — the finished 3-D logo.

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In this easy ActionScript lesson I will explain to you how to create professional, clean and polished buttons. No design tools will be used in this tutorial. Just pure ActionScript code! Please note that this is a lesson made for Flash 8 pro. You will learn how to:

• Create new movie clips from scratch,
• Create nested movie clips with ActionScript too,
• Create stunning gradients and other graphics via ActionScript,
• Import and embed fonts into Flash, understand how they work and add to the size of your SWF movie,
• Create dynamic text fields from scratch and format them using the myriad properties available in ActionScript,
• Import, create and apply filter effects to movie clips and text fields, and more.

Below are a few examples of the many buttons, menus and designs that you can create via ActionScript.

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In this easy lesson made for Flash 8 professional I will explain to you how to create a cool website menu, with gel buttons, that are encased (inset) in a metal background. You will, among other things, learn the following Flash techniques:

• How to use the linear gradient fill option to create a realistic metal background for your website menu,
• How to create great looking gel buttons, with a nice gradient fill, a white shine and overlay to make them look more realistic,
• How to apply the Bevel filter available in Flash 8 professional to have that great inset effect that will make the buttons seem encased in the metal menu background,
• How to easily create multiple menu buttons from a single button symbol, and more.

You can see the live Flash example of the menu that you are going to learn to make below.

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In this thoroughly explained, detailed lesson made for Flash 8, I will show you how to create a really cool, complete Flash website navigation and loading system. The menu that you will make has a built-in animated preloader. You will learn:

• How to design a menu with a built-in preloader (a numerical one),
• How to create a preloader animation behind the menu buttons,
• How to create stylish menu buttons,
• How to make ActionScript code that will enable the preloading of external Flash (SWF) content
• How to make a main preloader for the menu system and much more.

This Flash menu/preloader system works seamlessly in the following browsers on a Windows machine: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6 and Opera 9. I have yet to test it on a Mac, but I suppose it will work perfectly there too.

Below is an example of the Flash website system that you are going to create. Try clicking the buttons to see what you’ll learn to make!

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In this easy Flash lesson I will show you how to use the coordinate system in Flash. You will learn the following:

• The directions in the Flash coordinate system,
• The difference between the way the coordinate system works in the Flash authoring environment and the way it is used by ActionScript,
• The main coordinate system and the movie clip based ones and more.

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In this easy lesson made for Flash 8 pro, I will teach you how to make a cool shiny orb using many of the available filters and blend modes that Flash 8 pro makes available. You will learn:

• How to combine various effects stacked one upon another on different layers,
• How to use the many Flash filters on movie clips,
• How to apply blend modes to movie clip symbols to achieve particular results,
• How to use radial gradient fills for background color and shiny light creation and much more!

Below is the live Flash example of the orb that you are going to make in this tutorial. You will also see some variations that can be applied to the orb once the basic form is finished.

NOTE: The SWF file containing the orb shown below has a size of only 503 bytes!!! Had this nice graphic been created in Photoshop, it would weigh at least 8 KB (in JPEG format) to look nice. Flash rules! Not that I don’t like Photoshop, quite the contrary .

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