Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Flash
Multimedia

Prepared by: Kelly Short

Kelly Short 1
Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Contents
Section Page

1 The Scene Panel 6

2 Action Panel 7

3 Creating a button 8
4 Adding a Library Button 10

5 Adding Sound to a button 11

6 Going from one scene to another 12

7 Going to frames of a scene (Changing pictures) 12
8 Turn sound on and off 13

9 Variables 15
10 Preloaders 17
11 Interactive Learning Components 20

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Screen Layout

Create a new Flash Document

Lists recently opened items

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 Timeline

Kelly Short
Flash 8 Multimedia

Library

Stage
Toolbar
Sydney CEO

4
Properties Bar
 Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

The Timeline
Empty Key Frame
Key Frame
Empty Frame

Layer Name

Onion Skinning

Scene and Symbol

New Layer, Motion Guide, Layer Folder

The Tools
Select (V) Sub Select (A)

Free Transform Tool (Q) Gradient Fill (F)

Line Tool (N) Lasso (L)

Pen Tool (P) Text (T)

Oval (O) Rectange (R)
Pencil (Y) Paintbrush (B)
Ink Bucket Tool (S) Paint Bucket (K)
Eye Dropper (I) Erase (E)

Hand Pan(H) Zoom (Z)

Stroke Colour
Fill Colour
Black and White, No colour, Swap Colours

Tool related Options

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

The Scene Panel

In order to create any multimedia product, you must cre-
ate multiple scenes, and navigate between them.

Open the scene panel by going to Window—>Other

Panels—>Scene

This lists the

scenes that are
within your
document.
Double click to
change the
names

Delete the
scene

Duplicate the
current scene Add a new
scene

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

The Action Panel

Add an action
script statement

States what object you

Lists all the action have added the action
script statements, script to
double click to add

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Creating Buttons
Setting up to create a multi page website. Each scene must have a stop script, otherwise it will
scroll through like an animation.

Add a layer to the scene

and rename it for organi-
zation.

Open the action toolbar

and type in

stop();

Create a rectangle with the rectangle tool

Select the rectangle and convert to a symbol

(Modify—> Convert to Symbol)

Make sure that

“Button” is
selected

Double click on the button to edit it

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Add keyframes to Over and Down, and change the button slightly on each keyframe

States of the buttons:

Button states are simply the different visual versions of a button as a user interacts. For example,
all the dialog boxes that appear in Flash contain an OK button. That button has a down state—
what it looks like when a user clicks it—that is slightly different (visually) from the normal up
state for the button. The buttons that you create in Flash can also have a down state. Actually,
you can also easily create an over state, which is the visual look of the button while the user puts
his cursor over it. For example, all the buttons in the Tools panel in Flash have an over state that
looks like a raised box. You'll learn to create this kind of effect in this hour.

(Sams Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash in 24 hours by Phillip Kerman)

The Hit State is the active area of the button. This is important if you create a button out of only
text, as anywhere where lines aren’t drawn on the text will not allow you to press the button

Open the actions window and type in the following:

on (release)
{
gotoAndPlay("SceneName",1);
}

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Adding a library button

Open Window—>Common
Libraries—>Buttons

This opens a library of but-

tons. Click and drag them
into your document to use.

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Adding Sound to a button

Insert a new layer above "Layer 1" and call it sound.

Insert a blank keyframe in the frame marked Down

Import a sound to the library

Add a blank keyframe to

where you want the sound
to play

Change the sound to

the one that you want
to play

Change the
sync value to
start

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Going to Scene
on (release) When button is
{ clicked
gotoAndPlay("SceneName",1);
}

Name of scene, Frame number

Going to Frames
on (release) When button is
{ clicked
gotoAndPlay(12);
}

Go to frame 12

Going to a website
on(release){
getURL("http://www.busdesigns.com","_blank");
}

Website URL

Window State

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Turn sound on and off

When you have the Properties panel reflecting sound for the intended keyframe, you can decide exactly
how the sound should play. The most fundamental choice you need to make is the Sync setting. This con-
trols exactly how a particular instance of the sound will play—or, more specifically, the priority of the
sound compared to the visual elements in the animation. Before you try out the Sync settings, see the fol-
lowing list and Figure 10.5 for an explanation of each:

• Event— Should be your default choice, especially for sound effects and other "incidental" sounds.
When Event is chosen, sounds will start to play when the keyframe is reached and keep playing until
the sound is done. Event sounds might not coincide with visual elements the same way on everyone's
machine. Sounds don't play more slowly or quickly (that would make them sound funny), but a ma-
chine with slower graphics performance might take longer to display visual elements. Suppose you
have a 1-second sound set to Event and your frame rate is 12 fps. You would expect that during the
sound, 12 frames would be displayed, but a slow machine might display only 6 fps during that 1 sec-
ond. In either case, the sound will finish 1 second later, as you would expect, but exactly how many
frames will have been displayed can vary.
•
• Start— This setting is almost the same as Event, except that multiple instances of the same sound
are prevented. With Event, a sound can be layered on top of itself, similar to singing a "round." Start,
on the other hand, plays a sound if it's not already playing.
•
• Stop— This setting is kind of weird—it's for when you want a specified sound to stop playing.
For example, say you import a sound called "background music" and make it start playing in the first
keyframe of one layer. Then you import another sound, "narration," and make it start playing in the
first keyframe of another layer. Then, in frame 10, you place another keyframe with the same sound
(background music) set to Stop, just that sound will stop. Both sounds start at the beginning, but on
frame 10 the background music stops and the narration continues to play. This is a bit strange because
normally you use the Properties panel to specify the sound you want to play where here you specify
the sound you want not to play. Think of Stop as "stop this sound if it's playing."
•
• Stream— This setting causes the sound to remain perfectly synchronized with the Timeline. Be-
cause, again, you can't have sounds playing slowly if the user's machine can't draw frames quickly
enough, this setting forces Flash to skip frames to keep up. Stream sounds start playing when the key-
frame is reached and continue to play as long as there is space in the Timeline. In other words, if your
sound is 3 seconds long and you're playing at 12 fps, the Timeline has to be at least 36 frames; other-
wise, part of the sound will never be reached. (You can compare the Stream setting to a Graphic Sym-
bol's behavior.) The benefit of the Stream setting is that the synchronization will always be the same.
If in this case you place a graphic in Frame 12, it will coincide perfectly with the first second of your
sound. Just remember that when you're using Stream, you have to ensure that there are enough frames
in the Timeline to accommodate the length of the sound. Finally, you preview Stream sounds as you
scrub, thus making the process of synchronizing audio to images possible.
•

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Add a button to the scene

Name it startButton

1. Select File > Import to import a sound.

2. Select the sound in the library, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh), and select Linkage.

Select Export for ActionScript and Export in First Frame; then give the
sound the identifier machineSound.

Add another button to the Stage and name it stopButton.

Select Frame 1 in the main Timeline, and select Window > Actions.
Add the following code to the Actions panel:

var song_sound:Sound = new Sound();

song_sound.attachSound("machineSound");

startButton.onRelease = function() {

song_sound.start();

};

stopButton.onRelease = function() {

song_sound.stop();

};

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Variables
Add a text field
here

Change to
Type in name
of Variable
here.
Add a new scene and create a button to go to it

on(release){
gotoAndPlay("Scene 2",1);
}

Select Show
border around
text

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Go to scene 2

Add a dynamic
text field

Change the Var property to the name

of the variable you want to display
Select Dynamic here

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Preloaders
Create a loading graphic and convert to a symbol. Double click to edit

Create a new layer, then draw a small section of green.

Insert a keyframe on frame 100
On Frame 100, create a rectangle the same shape as the black and colour it green
Shape tween to create a loading bar

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Create some dynamic text fields like below. This is where the information
will be displayed.

Dynamic

Create a new layer called scriptpercent and add the following code:

// store BytesLoaded in variable called LoadedBytes

_root.LoadedBytes = _root.getBytesLoaded();
// store BytesTotal in variable called TotalBytes
_root.TotalBytes = _root.getBytesTotal();
// to get percentage of how much is loaded
// divide number of Loaded Bytes by Total Bytes and times by 100
// the floor bit rounds off to the nearest integer
_root.percentLoaded = (Math.floor(_root.LoadedBytes/
_root.TotalBytes*100));
_root.Bar.gotoAndStop(_root.percentLoaded);

// add the % symbol

_root.percentDisplay = _root.percentLoaded+"%";

Add the next script to

frame 10. This will loop
the animation until all
frames are loaded

// we are creating a loop that keeps going back to frame 1 until we are 100%
bytes loaded
// the value of our variable = 100 all bytes are loaded so go to Next scene
if (_root.percentLoaded == 100) {
nextScene();
} else {
// if not all bytes are loaded go to and play 1
gotoAndPlay(1);
}

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Add a layer for frames so far and add the following code:

// store number of total frames in variable called _root.allframes

_root.allframes = _totalframes;
// store number of frames loaded in variable called _root.framesofar
_root.framesofar = _framesloaded;

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Interactive Components
Open the Learning Interactions Library

Click and Drag the required interaction onto the desktop, and
break it apart.

Open the Component Inspector

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Flash 8 Multimedia Sydney CEO

Type your
question here

You can change

the answers

Navigate to
further options
here

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