Getting Started with Flash and first impressions.

This blog was started in response to the need to journal my efforts to learn Abobe Flash CS3 as a requirement for my EDTL6310 class at Bowling Green State University.

We are in Module 2 of the course and this has been a really big two weeks for me work wise. Last week I spent two days at the FreeTech Ohio conference which was held at the Kalihari Resort in Freemont Ohio and this week it was two days in Columbus for the Ohio Educational Technology Conference.

With all this time away from the office and away from home, I have found it difficult to find time to work on Flash at least as much as I had planned to in my original plan that was submitted.

Last week I got through the Basics Section (A) of videos on Atomic Learning but found that while it introduced me to the tools and controls of Flash it really did not give me the understanding to be able to create anything yet.

This week I started on section B (Basic Tool Techniques) and again while I learned some techniques there was not really enough covered to help me create something. So I decided to open up Flash and just do some experimenting based on the videos that I had seen and to try and create something.

I was able to create a 468x60 banner that could go on a website. My plan right now is to learn how to animate it and add frames to the document so that the banner will become an animated flash banner. I started with some text on a white background but you cannot see that it is a banner. It is shown below.



I added a rectangle which I created with the Rectangle Primitive Tool which I learned from AL can have rounded corners and is easy to change the stroke and fill.
We have a gold background and I dragged the text layer on top of the other one in the order (I knew how to do that in Photoshop and Flash is the same way with layers) I am guessing that like Photoshop each object that is added to the stage is on top of the existing objects.


So here we have a file that has two layers which was outputted as a PNG file.

As we go along and more is added to the project and once I have done animations I assume that it will be saved as a SWF file but all that is ahead of me yet.