Free Adobe Flash Tutorials: Recent Episodes
Bryan Williams
Free Adobe Flash Tutorials is a video blog/podcast dedicated to teaching people how to use Adobe's Flash program effectively. Step-by-step tutorials are offered on a variety of subjects in an easy to follow fashion. Check weekly for new video downloads, links, tips, and tricks.
Start/Stop Button for Animation This Tutorial shows you how to make your own start/stop button for an animated sequence.
Start and Stop Drag Add interactivity to your Flash files with this basic tutorial on start/stopDrag functions in actionscript 2.0. This function allows the user to manually move objects with their mouse clicks.
Rotating This is a tutorial that shows you an easy way to make an object rotate with actionscript.
Picture Rotator Slideshow This tutorial shows you how to create a picture rotating slideshow, that fades in and out using Adobe Flash. Using optimized embeded photos is not the only way, but it is a very basic and easy method to create a slideshow picture rotator.
Loading Sound This basic tutorial shows how to import sound into a Flash file with and without actionscript.
Mouse RollOverOut Basic Flash tutorial showing you how to make an event occur when you scroll the mouse on and off an object using actionscript 2.0. Make sure to check out www.freeadobeflashtutorials.com for more tutorials and links to articles and tutorial websites.
Import photos and psd
There are a few ways to bring pictures into a Flash file. This tutorial shows one simple way to do that. You can work with the photos in many ways, which will be discuss in later tutorials. Importing a .psd directly into Flash can be very useful because it maintains the layers in CS3, making it easy to animate or apply action script later to the layer.
Motion Tween Fading In & Out A short tutorial showing how to make an object or a photo fade in and out using a motion tween. Pressing F8, turn the object into a graphic. In the properties panel under the 'color' area set one frame of the object to a desired alpha and change it in another frame. A motion tween will tween between the two attributes creating a fade in or out effect.
Intro to Movie Clips A tutorial covering the very basics of Movie Clips. Movie clips offer the ability to nest time-lines within time-lines. It also is an important part of creating interactive flash elements later with actionscript and important to know about.
Motion & Shape Tweens This episode is a very basic introduction to shape tweens and motion tweens.
Shape tweens can allow you to give the impression that an object morphs into another. Motion tweens are used when the same object merely changes location or minor attributes (such as alpha).
Reverse frame-by-frame trick
This tutorial covers a handy method to frame-by-frame animation. Starting with the final image, you can erase part of each frame going backwards to give the effect of animation. This makes animating an object or scene very quick.
Animating Text
This episode covers another just very basic tip to frame by frame animation. The episode focuses on breaking text into images with apple B so that text can be animated in the same way a picture would.
Frame-by-frame animation
This episode covers the very basics of flash frame-by-frame animation. Here I teach you how to make a pacman figure open and close his mouth.
In the next two episodes I will show you some handy tips and tricks with animation and and practical application with flash.
Basic Flash Interface is an introduction to the basic layout and tools of Adobe Flash.
It takes a look at its tools, windows, interface, and properties.
Episode 2: An introduction to what you can do with Flash
This podcast covers some simple examples of what you can do with flash.
ActScript 2.0 Stop & restart animation .swf files loop by default, if the timeline is more than one frame. With simple actionscript you can control and navigate a frame-by-frame animated sequence.
Layer Masks Layer masks create a viewing window to the layer(s) behind it. Manipulating the mask can create certain effects or animation without editing the object or layer directly.
Progress Bar Preloader Actionscript. Preloaders indicate the rate at which a file is being downloaded or displayed. This tutorial shows the actionscript 2.0 method to create such a progress bar. Go to the Flash Files section to download the actual .fla file. Make sure to check out the other tutorial on progress bars to help create the correct components.
Progbar Preloader Viewing and loading files on the web often takes time, especially multimedia. Progressbar preloaders are important to show the viewer that content is coming. This tutorial is the first of two tutorials that will show you how to create and code a preloader. It will show you how to make a graphical and numerical representation of downlaod progress of the file.