Working with Flash 8

The second project students do in my class is to use Flash to create an animated Ad Banner. I stat by showing them some examples of what can be done with Flash, including some animated movies and professionally developed ad banners.

We stared with several of Adobe's tutorials. Wow. I found out that there have been a lot of changes between Flash 4, Flash MX, and Flash 8. The first tutorial I chose was really simple, but the second proved somewhat difficult to follow. It was creating a flexible messaging area (fma) for a restuarant. The end poduct looked pretty cool, but I don't know if the learning was very helpful. It wasn't obvious why they were doing all of the steps in setting up the slides until the very end.

I tried to break up the tutorials with a few mini-lessons to show students how to import clip art and do tweening. I thought that my motion tweening examples went pretty well. My attempt to do a simple ad banner with a shape tween totally flopped. I was pretty embarrassed to not be able to get the word "Sun" to morph into a circle that looked like the sun.

I redeemed myself the next day, but only after searching lots of on-line resources for help. I found out that symbols and grouped objects can't be shape tweened. Text has to be converted to static text and broken apart TWICE before the letter shapes can be morphed into another word or shape. With motion tweens it is usually a good idea to convert objects to symbols, but this is something NOT to do when you make a shape tween.

Once again, I'm finding that my students are pretty creative folks. They are staring to come up with some pretty cool ideas for their banners. Now I have the challenge of helping them make their ideas take shape into animated banners. It really helps when they have sketched out a storyboard showing what they want to do with their banner.