Advanced Flash Tutorial

The previous Flash tutorial introduces you to the basics of drawing and creating symbols. Here we look at how to make things move around and to bring interactivity to Flash movies.

Interactivity is brought about by capturing certain events made by the user. These events can be mouse movement, clicking with the mouse button, or keyboard input. The information generated through events is passed to Event Handlers. Complex interactivity can be generated using ActionScript, which is a simple programming language built into Flash.

Animation and interactivity can be accomplished only with symbols. Symbols, you will recall can be of three types, graphic, button or movie. The advantage with symbols is that you can reuse the information stored in a symbol many times in the same Flash file without increasing its size. Since Flash was created for use on the Internet, Flash files should be small so that they are downloaded quickly.

Each session in this tutorial explains how to make a small movie (animated and/or interactive). These movies can then serve as building blocks to more complex movies.

Here are the things that we will cover in the Advanced Flash tutorial:

• Flash Animation Course - Motion tweening
• Flash Text Effect Tutorial - Fades
• Flash web site design tutorial - Fade-in and fade-out effect
• Flash animation tutorial - Fade and motion tween together
• Special Effects in Flash
• Online Flash Help - Splits
• Shape tweening in Flash
• Flash Tutorial Animation - Tween Properties
• Motion on a defined path in Flash
• Flash Mask Tutorial - Masking
• Button tutorial Flash - Simple buttons
• Flash Button Tutorial - Animated button
• Flash tutorial - Scroll Menu
• Flash ActionScript Tutorial - Mouse drags