We have decided to widely cover most common and specific aspects of "Flash". This is the section to help our customers to handle with "Flash". You will find very usefull tips and tricks of design with "Flash" for novice and for advanced customers. So, let's begin!

Make a Flash Movie

As you are about to find out, making a simple movie in Flash 8 is an easy task even for a beginner. By the end of this lesson you will have made a movie with animated text. You could probably use an effect like this for an animated title in a Flash movie. Keep in mind that the features you will be using in this chapter are available in both Flash 8 Basic and Flash 8 Professional versions. In this quick tour, you will get a glimpse of several different aspects of Flash. In doing so, you will get a feel for how the design process works in Flash. Get Set Up Before you make a movie in Flash, you need to launch the application and create a new file. When you launch Flash, you will see a Start page. The Start page allows you to select the type of document you want to create from a menu list. The Start page is covered in Chapter 2, but for the sake of getting started quickly, here you’ll proceed directly to a new page.

1. In the middle column of the Start page, select Create New | Flash Document. A new page appears. In Flash, the white area on this page is called the stage. This is where you create your movie.

2. The background for the title you are about to create may be more compelling if it is given a color other than white. You can change the color of the movie background in the Properties Inspector. The Properties Inspector is a window located at the bottom of the workspace that allows you to set and change the characteristics of elements, also known as “assets,” in Flash. To change the color of the background, first click the stage. Then, in the Properties Inspector, click the color swatch to the right of the word “Background.” From the pop-up menu, select a background color or leave the background the default white. The Properties Inspector and color swatch are shown here:

3. You should always save a Flash movie at the beginning of, and many times during, the creation of your project. Saving documents frequently will prevent you from pulling your hair out later if the application crashes and you lose your movie. To save your movie, select File | Save As from the menu. In both the Windows and Macintosh environments, the Save As dialog box is similar to those in most standard applications. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the file, give the file a name in the Save As input box, and click the Save button. The Save As dialog box is shown here.

Next, you’ll type some text onto the stage and format it.
Input Text
In this section you will create the text that will be animated in the next section. The completed movie will show an animated title in which a word spins around. To examine a completed version of this exercise, download the sample file for Chapter 1 for this book on the McGraw-Hill/ Osborne site (www.osborne.com) and click the “free code” link. The file is named animation.swf. Click the file to play the movie.
Here’s a description of how the movie works. When it loads, the audience sees a spinning title that says “ANIMATION.” The spinning title gradually fades out of sight.
To create the text in this movie, you’ll need to use the Text tool in the Tools panel. This panel is a long rectangle with multiple icons. By default, it appears on the left side of your workspace.