Flash CS5 Fundamentals

Quick Facts

Delivery Method Online
Professional Certificate
24hrs Suggested Study Time
3 Months Access
Tutor Support
Study On Any Device
1110 Students

Learn how to use Adobe Flash CS5 to create engaging Web sites, Flash movies, animation, and interactive applications.

Take your graphics skills to a whole new level by adding Flash to your designer toolkit! In this course, you'll learn how to create animated, interactive movies in Adobe Flash CS5.

These days, Flash movies are everywhereâ€”including the Internet, films, TV shows and commercials, and computer games. The skills you'll learn in this course will get you started on your way to a lucrative career designing animated graphics and special effects for one of these fun and exciting fields.

During this course, you'll create a full-blown Flash application, complete with animated text and graphics and interactive buttons. You'll start by exploring the Flash workspace, creating text and graphics, and animating objects on the Flash movie stage. Next, you'll look in detail at the anatomy of a Flash movieâ€”how to use the Flash timeline, layers, and frames to control objects and timing on the stage.

While you can create an entire movie in Flash, most often you'll need to import graphics, sounds, and digital videos from other applications. While creating your first Flash movie, you'll learn how to format and embed external digital media and how to make them appear or play at specific times. You'll also learn how to control digital media based on specific events, such as end user mouse clicks.

Because no course on Flash is complete without an introduction to ActionScript, Flash's powerful programming language, you'll create interactive buttons with ActionScript 3.0. You'll also learn to write scripts that control movie flow and scripts that call to and load external videos, Web pages, and other Flash movie files.

As you create your movie, you'll find out how to design and animate 3-D objects, sync sounds with animations, and publish your Flash movies to the Internet. By the end of the course, you'll know how to create and publish Flash movies and applications, and you'll be well on your way to becoming a Flash designer.

Courses are delivered to you through expertly executed lessons, online instruction and interaction with like-minded students. Our courses are designed to deliver all of the benefits of studying in a classroom whilst giving you the flexibility to study at a time and place to suit your needs. You can access your classroom 24/7 from any device with an internet connection.

This course has a 3 month duration. You'll complete comprehensive lessons, quizzes and assignments before submitting your final exam at the end of the course to achieve your certificate. Courses must be completed within the 3 month access period.

Many people think of Adobe Flash as animation software, but it’s much more than that. Flash is the industry standard for creating animated, interactive movies and applications. It's also widely used in TV commercials and cinema special effects. In our first lesson, you'll begin by getting acquainted with the Flash interface, or workspace. Then, I’ll show you how to create your first animated graphic. Whether you've worked with Flash a bit before or this is your first time opening the program, you'll be well on your way to becoming a Flash designer when you finish this lesson.

Flash comes with everything you need to create complete interactive movies and applications, including a palette of tools for drawing lines and shapes. Today you'll learn how to draw rectangles, circles, and lines to create a framework for a Flash movie. I’ll show you how to change line and fill properties, and how to apply special effects such as drop shadows and gradient fills to the objects you draw. You'll also learn how to arrange and distribute objects on the Flash Stage with the tremendously useful Align panel.

Nearly every Flash movie calls for some kind of text—such as buttons, headlines, captions, and taglines. In this lesson, I’ll show you how to use Flash’s Text tool to create basic text. Then we'll apply all kinds of formatting options and special effects—such as colors, drop shadows and bevels—to make the text more interesting and appealing. The text you create in this lesson will become the buttons, headlines, and captions for our ongoing movie project during the remainder of the course. We’ll also take a brief look at Flash CS5’s new TLF Text feature, a whole new text formatting engine that greatly expands text formatting options and text display quality.

In Flash and other animation programs, events happen over time. Flash measures time in frames on a grid called a Timeline. Today you'll learn how the Timeline works. We'll use it and Flash’s Layers feature to distribute and animate several objects on the Stage. We'll animate our buttons and graphics so that they fade onto the Stage at different intervals in our movie. You'll also see how to use Flash’s tweens (automatic animation creation tools) to make objects move frame-by-frame on the Stage. We’ll also take a quick look at Movie Clip symbols. By the end of this lesson, you'll understand the basics of animation in Flash.

As your ongoing movie grows in file size and length, you’ll find that breaking it into logically organized scenes makes it easier to work with. This time, I’ll show you how to create new scenes. Then, we’ll look at importing elements from other programs, such as Photoshop and Word. Most of the movies people create in Flash contain objects created in external graphics programs. I’ll show you how to create your first TFL Text box, how to embed fonts, and how to figure out what fonts to embed. You'll also learn the basics of bitmap and vector graphics formatting so that using these objects in Flash movies is a lot easier.

Ready. Set. Action! You can make your movies more interesting, entertaining, and informative with sound and digital video. While it’s relatively easy to import a media file into Flash, getting the results you want is not so straightforward. In this lesson, I’ll tell you what you need to know about sound and digital video file formats. Then, we'll look at how to make sounds play. You'll discover how to create ambient backgrounds for your movies and how to make sounds play on specific events, such as mouse-overs and clicks. You’ll also learn how to use different mouse states, creating rollover-like effects that change the button’s behavior as users mouse around in your movies.

To produce applications in Flash, you must know how to create interactivity—or how to tell the movie what to do when a user clicks a button. Today, you'll see how to use ActionScript 3.0, Flash’s powerful programming language, to make your buttons work. We'll look at basic programming concepts, and then we'll write some event listener and event handler scripts that make our buttons hot and our movie interactive. When we finish, you’ll have created a complete Flash movie with working buttons, button sound effects, and user navigation.

ActionScript 3.0 is the backbone for creating sophisticated Flash movies. In this lesson, we'll look deeper into programming with ActionScript. You'll learn how to create buttons that allow the user to control animation, and we'll create a short movie that lets users view products online in various colors. We’ll also take a look at the new Code Snippets panel and learn how to let Flash create basic scripts automatically and how to save your own code snippets you can use any time in any movie. Since we’re venturing into more advanced Flash topics, we’ll also take a look at creating and manipulating 3-D graphics in Flash. Finally, you'll learn how to create complex animations with Flash’s Motion Editor.

If you've watched a few Flash movies, you've probably noticed that many of them have several features in common: progress bars that tell users how long they must wait before the movie starts playing; image galleries for displaying photos and product images; similar sounds and animations. To save you time when you're creating these common elements, Flash comes with several premade components that install these effects for you. You can find thousands of components on the Web, or you can save your own components and use them over and over. Flash also comes with many motion presets that make it easy to create sophisticated animations. Today we'll take a look at using motion presets and creating and saving your own animations for use in multiple movies.

Like most high-end software programs, Flash comes with and supports files from many other applications. In this lesson, we'll look at Adobe Media Encoder. Media Encoder is a nifty little utility that comes with Flash and lets you format video and sound files for Flash movies and other applications, such as YouTube. We'll also explore the tight integration between Photoshop and Flash—you'll learn how to work more quickly and efficiently by importing your Photoshop files directly into Flash. We'll even touch on creating Flash movies for cell phones with Adobe Device Central, another cool utility included with Flash.

Flash CS5 has a bunch of great tools and features for creating sophisticated graphics effects and complex animations. Today, we'll look at three of them: the Deco tool, the Spray Brush tool, and the Bone tool. The first two tools create graphics special effects in highly useful and professional-looking patterns. The Bone tool is an animation tool that lets you easily create animations that simulate the movement of humans and animals—things like people walking, animals running, and birds flying. These tools will help you give your movies and animations a polished, professional look.

Why should you do all this work to create interactive movies if you can’t share them with the world? In your final lesson, you'll find out how to publish your work to the Internet. You'll learn how Web servers work and how to upload files to make your creations public. You'll also have a chance to integrate your movies into Adobe Dreamweaver files and then use that popular application to upload your movies to a public Web server. When you finish this lesson, you’ll have successfully joined the elite ranks of Flash designers.

William Harrel

As owner and operator of The Write Desktop Publisher for more than 20 years, William Harrel has been involved in designing Web and print media on computers since the early days of desktop publishing. In addition to running his own design firm, he ... Read more

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Frequently Asked Questions

Once you've made the payment, we'll send you a confirmation email with a link to start your course. Feel free to get started whenever you're ready!

You'll have 3 months access to your course. In that time you are free to study at your own pace. The course duration is 24 hours.

Online learning is a flexible way to study that fits around your schedule, giving you the freedom to learn at your own pace from anywhere in the world. You'll have 3 months to complete the course and can take the multiple-choice questions and final exam whenever it suits you.

If you need help, you can contact us anytime. You can also join the discussion area where you can interact with other students. The discussion area for each lesson is open for the entire duration of the course.

Of course! We offer a 7-day money back guarantee. As long as you haven't completed the course, you can get a full refund within 7 days of enrolling.

We do not offer extensions or transfers for this self-paced course. However, you will have 3 months to complete the course, and if you need to cancel within the first 10 days of enrolment, we offer a money back guarantee.

What people are saying about our courses

This course was more intense than I had anticipated but rewarding beyond measure! I believe it has provided a solid foundation for using Flash. Thank you.

Verified Student

Good job by an accomplished instructor with good insight into what helps students learn the material. Style was comfortable and relaxed. Good "tone."

Verified Student

This is my first online course and I would recommend it. I will be taking other courses with you, I have friends that have paid so much more and have gotten less out of their courses, Thanks!

Verified Student

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The Learning Environment

From the moment that you enrol in the Flash CS5 Fundamentals you will become an integral part of our learning community. You'll find yourself with the freedom to learn at a speed that suits you, on any device, from anywhere in the world. Achieving your career goals no longer has to mean compromising family and work commitments.

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