If you are a professional animator and want to learn to use the Flash environment as a vehicle for your creative work then this is the book for you. It gets you up to speed fast with the basics of how to use Flash MX to animate, so you can start concentrating on how best to translate your animation skills to this medium. The techniques shown throughout the book build up in skill level quickly, showing you clearly and concisely the most effective way to translate your animations into Flash with the focus remaining on the importance of creative animation techniques. Benefit from Sprite Interactive's wealth of tips and tricks from their wide range of professional Flash animation work and successful training courses. Learn how to apply these techniques to your own work, how to make your characters run in Flash, speed them up and slow them down, make them stumble as they walk, show their anger or fear, make them come to life. Alex Michael, Lead Animator and MD of Sprite Interactive (www.sprite.net), shows you how to achieve all the creative skills of traditional animation using Flash so you can create work for a wide variety of new and innovative platforms, including PocketPCs and interactive TV, as well as video and the web. The free CD includes all the files you need to try everything in the book for yourself, as well as invaluable time and money saving animation processes and tools. Make sure you are at the cutting edge of animation and push your creative skills to the edge, if you want to animate successfully in Flash, buy this book.

If you are a professional animator and want to learn to use the Flash environment as a vehicle for your creative work then this is the book for you. It gets you up to speed fast with the basics of how to use Flash MX to animate, so you can start concentrating on how best to translate your animation skills to this medium. The techniques shown throughout the book build up in skill level quickly, showing you clearly and concisely the most effective way to translate your animations into Flash with the focus remaining on the importance of creative animation techniques. Benefit from Sprite Interactive's wealth of tips and tricks from their wide range of professional Flash animation work and successful training courses. Learn how to apply these techniques to your own work, how to make your characters run in Flash, speed them up and slow them down, make them stumble as they walk, show their anger or fear, make them come to life. Alex Michael, Lead Animator and MD of Sprite Interactive (www.sprite.net), shows you how to achieve all the creative skills of traditional animation using Flash so you can create work for a wide variety of new and innovative platforms, including PocketPCs and interactive TV, as well as video and the web. The free CD includes all the files you need to try everything in the book for yourself, as well as invaluable time and money saving animation processes and tools. Make sure you are at the cutting edge of animation and push your creative skills to the edge, if you want to animate successfully in Flash, buy this book.

Covers the essentials that new Flash users need to create basic Flash animations, including creating Flash-ready graphics, animating the graphics, and adding sound and interactive elements. Series features: Includes the simple instructions targeting beginning audiences that have pushed the For Dummies series to over 100 million books in print. ABOUT THE CD-ROM CD includes a trial version of Flash as well as other Macromedia tools including Dreamweaver and Fireworks.

A guide for the novice to the Flash MX 22004 computer game.

This book is broken up into a collection of hands-on seminars that each focus on teaching a specific aspect of Flash MX. The author begins each seminar by teaching core concepts and techniques. Then, in the workshop, she takes the reader step by step through applying those concepts and techniques to an actual Flash movie. By working through the book cover to cover, you can build an entire Flash web site that includes compelling graphics and animation, audio and video, ActionScript-driven activities, games and personalization, components, and XML-driven forms.

* Includes perspectives from both traditional broadcast animators and seasoned Flash animators. * Provides information on pitfalls to avoid and where to find additional resources on Flash, animation, and television production. * Packed with tips, techniques, and case studies from shops on the cutting edge of Flash development. * Companion Website includes dynamic examples from the book and links to the hottest broadcast Flash animation created by third parties.

What started as a simple animation tool has evolved into a full-fledged Web development environment. Which means that if you're like many of today's Flash developers, you may know little about actually creating animations and effects with the program. Here to solve that dilemma is a hands-on guide from one of today's leading Flash experts. By showing you how to create 10 projects based on real-world Web solutions, authorJen deHaanprovides a thorough grounding in all of Flash's effects and animation fundamentals. Each chapter represents a single project with simple step-by-step instructions for re-creating the cool Web elements pictured in these pages: an animated character, a Flash interface that uses transitions to "page" through different areas of a site, an animated gallery, a dynamic menu that animates using the Tween classes, a simple game, button effects, Timeline animations, scripted effects, text effects, and more! Ten real-world projects reveal the magic behind the most useful Flash-produced animations and effects, and a companion CD includes lesson files and sample software.

Explores how to use and create features including graphics, text, symbols, animation, interactivity, sound, video, ActionScript, content, printable movies, and Web sites.

Discusses topics including creating and modifying graphics, using non-Flash graphics, frame-by-frame animations, interactivity, and adding sound and video.

by Bruce Herbert and Diana Johnson ofSorenson Media Creative boundaries are being blown apart as Macromedia Flash MX ushers in a new era of moving images on the Internet. At its launch, analysts predicted that the Flash Player would transform itself from being a lightweight animation tool" to "the de facto technology for simple web interactivity5* (Randy Souza, Forrester). Since then though, Flash developers combining vector animation and video have proven that it's capable of much, much more than "simple web interactivity". We're still just beginning to scratch the surface of the possibilities it opens up to us, but already it looks like Flash MX is becoming the key technology for pushing video creativity on the Web to a new whole level. Understandably, many people look at Flash as just another way to deliver video on the Web, one more program for showing movies on your desktop. Well, it can certainly do that - but there's a whole lot more it can do besides! You can use ActionScript to add custom controls, determine a video playback sequence, or mask your video with a custom shape. You can use layering to create special effects, design custom templates for e-learning applications, and use lightweight video streams along with Flash animation in rich media e-mail campaigns.