Flash Tutorial: General Introduction & Tools

I consider myself by no means an expert in Flash at all. In fact, I'm quite the opposite. But I figured that I'd help other beginners out by typing out some tutorials as I learn things, so we'd be sort of on the same page! Please read through my tutorials in order!

This tutorial will contain a very brief introduction to Adobe Flash CS3. You can download a trial version of Adobe Flash CS3 at their web site.

The first thing you should do when you open Flash is to familiarize yourself with the layout and tools. Go to File > New > ActionScript 3.0 and a new file will open for you. Please refer to the following image for the rest of the tutorial.

This is what your basic flash setup should look like at the moment. The four most important toolbars/palettes on the page, which I've conveniently marked, are tools, layers (timeline), properties, and library. If any of those toolbars aren't present, you can find them under the Window tab at the top.

The Tools toolbar is fairly self-explanatory. You can mess around with all the tools to find out what they do if you can't deduce so yourself already. Please note that if you left click and press down on the Free Transform Tool (3rd down), the Pen Tool (5th down), and the Rectangle Tool (8th down) even more tools will emerge.

The Layers or Timeline palette is what you will be using to actually create animations in Flash. You can right click on Layer one to create a new layer, turn a layer into a mask (will be covered later), and a variety of other functions. The dot to the immediate left of the green square and to the right of Layer 1 can be used to lock the layer. if you click it, you can lock it so that nothing can be changed on the layer. The dot to the left of that can be clicked if you want your layer to be invisible while you work on other layers. Take note of the timeline to the right of the layer - this will be covered more in depth when I teach you how to animate in Flash.

The Properties window is also extremely important for changing how your tools work, changing your document size, etc. Always keep an eye on it - note that when you click on different tools, you can do different things with the properties.

The Library is where the images that you will be using in your animation is stored. It's better to have any images you create in the library as you can just drag it onto the screen and duplicate it - the file size of your flash video would not increase no matter how many times you duplicate it.

To use images or to work on an image, you first have to import it into your Flash file. Go to File > Import > Import to Library. You can import any type of image file, including Photoshop files. You can also choose to import to stage, but usually I prefer to just import it to the library directly.

When you are done with your Flash animation, you must go to File > Publish. All flash files that you work on are .fla files, and Flash will publish your file into a .swf file with an accompanying Javascript file that you will need as well in order to run the video.

Keep in mind that to make Flash interact with users, you will be using ActionScript. My tutorials will focus on the visual elements of Flash and I will teach you accompanying ActionScript as I need to.

Take a few moments to explore around a bit on your own - if you feel overwhelmed, don't worry. I'll keep it simple and reiterate everything again in the next tutorials!

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