Flash Tutorial

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Introduction

Flash is Macromedia's powerful vector-based animation tool. Flash is the defacto standard for Internet multimedia because it allows authors to create online multimedia presentations with minimum file sizes. With Flash, Web presentations can blend text and pictures with video and audio, interactive buttons, and animated charts and graphs.

Flash is also becoming a rich ground for multimedia journalism, because its interactivity lends itself as a medium to non-linear, reader-directed storytelling.

While Flash is used on the most advanced Internet media sites, basic uses, like generating animated slideshows, are fairly easy to learn.

In this tutorial we take a two-pronged approach to learning Flash. First we look at basic shape drawing and animation tools and the workspace. Then we switch to a walkthrough on creating multimedia slideshows with video, audio and playback controls. Unlike most Flash tutorials, this one is aimed specifically at the needs of journalists, and does not dwell on drawing and animation techniques.

This tutorial was written for Flash 8, so some of the procedures we describe may be slightly different if you have an older or newer version of Flash.

Note: Downloadable examples in .fla format can be found on the last page of this tutorial.

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