FLASH scripting starter 1

This is a course of seven afternoons introducing art students to FLASH, scripting, i gave at the WDKA.nl in Rotterdam.

This blog gives mainly examples, which are explained and have to be modified by the students during class.

Of course, teaching how to script to students which have no technical background starts at the beginning and this is a course avoiding all OO programming or use of classes and/or packages.

The goal is to steer around movieclips, learn about eventlisteners from the mouse and the keyboard, load external sounds and images, do a few transformations, rescaling etc. In the end i show the Ripple example and do a atan2 function to get the rotation from the mouse.

One student started immediately programming the wii remote, making anaglyphs of his digital photo's and using the Colortransform of FLASH. He was one or more levels up. This also happens at an art school!

So we start with zero knowledge. All the relevant windows of FLASH are demonstrated.

The first lesson is demonstrating, showing the things we will learn. This lesson proved to be very difficult, later on we went slower and the students practiced the scripts more themselves, using there own ideas and imagery.

The first example movies can be found here:http://www.contrechoc.com/flash/flash-basics.zip

(CS3 examples made in Flash CS3 also working in Flash CS4)

the basics:

a framelabel example, good for alternative presentations

a sound loading example

an image loading example

the scripts are small, and can be copied and pasted into other scripts, (be careful though!)

a sound folder and a banana are joining the party.

a great site for FLASH examples (tutorials, also photoshop things) is http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/10/30/65-excellent-flash-designs/

Sounds: FLASH handles only .mp3 ,free sounds can be found at: http://www.freesound.org/

images/cartoons can be found everywhere, google images with the keyword “cartoon” and “rabbit” for instance, also this kind of site can be found easily: http://www.barrysclipart.com/barrysclipart.com/index.php

FLASH games? There are about three trillion to be found, but this is a great site: http://www.flash-game.net/