Flash MX Motion Graphics covers a variety of motion graphic techniques, taking you from planning and gathering materials through executing, fine-tuning, and adjusting the finished piece. It also features interviews with 10 Flash artists from around the world, including Hillman Curtis, Eric Jordan, and Todd Purgason. This book focuses on skills to harness motion graphics in Flash MX, including: * Digitizing video, and capturing, saving, and editing sound * Incorporating text animation and bitmap images * Working around constraints such as file sizes and the limitations of the computer screen * Adding interactive elements * Using Photoshop and 3D programs to create background images The author's website, www.seoleuna.com, experiments with the various interactive possibilities of Flash and motion graphics and is featured throughout the book. It's based on the concept of introducing an off-line exhibition to the Internet, which serves as a personal exhibition space for Seol Euna.

A grand master of Flash, Penner is known around the world for his technical innovations and organic style. This book provides readers with exclusive insight into the programming and design process of this groundbreaking Flash designer and ActionScript programmer.

Confused by ActionScript? Want to get to grips with creating interactive graphics and animation in Flash quickly? Whether you are a new user or a professional illustrator, designer or animator experienced in other animation and effects packages, this highly visual, color book will be all you need to get you up and running with the latest powerful upgrade - Flash MX 2004. Birgitta Hosea uses tried and tested material based on her teaching, breaking down the software into its main components and providing lots of screenshots and simple step-by-step instructions. This encourages you to get the most out of the programme and fully develop your skills, whilst allowing those with particular needs to 'jump ahead'. The structure and style, influenced by her commercial and creative expertise, allows you either as a student or professional to dip in and out according to the needs of your specific projects, but also allows the exploration of the programmes capability when you have more time. It is a generalist, accessible, visual and a truly introductory guide, written from the perspective of a designer with a thorough coverage of the basic features of Flash MX 2004, without going too in-depth into coding with ActionScript. Birgitta Hosea is a motion graphics artist and Course Director of the London Animation Studio at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Her experience ranges from designing idents and promotional materials to working as an Art Director on pop promos and short films.

This is a comprehensive introduction to Macromedia Flash, combined with special beginning-level coverage of ActionScript, Flash's native programming language.

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.

Let's make movies! Interactive movies, totally integrated into your Flash interface! With Macromedia Flash MX you have the power to import digital video and sound, and manipulate them just like any other media object. That's a whole world of design possibilities. This book hopes to take you through all you'll need to know about producing such wonderful sites. The first section will give you a thorough grounding in how best to import your video and sound into Flash and the many different ways that you can manipulate it once it's in there. Then, in the second section, we'll go through a complete real-world case study from pre-production on the video to final output on the web and CD-ROM. Finally, we'll see how you can apply use some advanced ActionScripting with video, and create a fully object-orientated sound and video playing Flash component that you'll be able to use time and time again. The inclusion of video support is the most noticeable and exciting feature in Flash MX - viewers who have the tiny Flash plug-in installed can now see video material that would otherwise necessitate the lengthy downloads and clunky interfaces of other web video plug-ins. This book is the guide you need for this exciting new universe, offering inspiration and technical guidance in equal measures. This book assumes no knowledge beyond an ability to work with Flash MX's interface, and is not intended for those with substantial digital video experience. As such, this book does not assume that the reader has access to expensive video-editing software. All you need for this book is access to Flash MX, and some imagination.

The days of Flash as a creative luxury are long gone. After months of downsizing, Flash creativity has been on a huge rationalization program. It is no longer enough to present animation in millions of colors and a hundred transparencies. It is no longer sufficient to provide interactivity and dynamism for their own sake. The purpose of this collection is to show how designers have taken Flash and made it work for its supper. What we discover is a series of creations that place Flash at the hub of cutting edge web content. The end result is a snapshot of Flash as the ideal medium. In these amazing examples, we see the software pushed to its limits to create unbeatable applications—a collapsible family tree, an interactive video learning system, and a drawing tool, capable of running online! Beyond this, we dip into the back-end capabilities to look at how to improve Flash still further. Some staple XML and PHP routines are brought in to add a bit of spice, while Flash's mysterious sharedObject command is hunted down and tamed to create a hybrid Tamagotchi houseplant—perfectly suited to lure surfers back to your website!

If you're serious about Flash design, and if you want to push your ideas to the very limits of possibility in Flash MX, then this book and CD are your indispensable companions. This package combines two vital elements: the most comprehensive and in-depth reference resource for Flash MX ActionScript Rich, and practical tutorials on using ActionScript effectively in your Flash movie design. We've packed in 20 chapters of tutorials, hundreds of detailed reference entries, and hundreds of example FLAs and SWFs. The CD reproduces and expands the complete ActionScript dictionary, providing you with a comprehensive and portable reference tool. To gain an idea of the CD's content, view our online demonstration. You can view all the dictionary's entries, but only the first 30 or so are functional. Our aim has been to make this book the best Flash MX ActionScript resource, bar none—the book that you'll keep on your desk and never exhaust.

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.