Wiley 978-0-470-38119-9 Datasheet download pdf (Page 13)

Staging your movies

The white box in the center of your screen is the

Stage.

Think of the Stage

as a movie screen where you place objects. You can place graphics and text

there and then animate them. Flash also plays back movies on the Stage.

Around the edge of the Stage is a gray area called the

Pasteboard.

You can

use the Pasteboard to store graphics that you plan to use soon but don’t

want on the Stage just yet. (For more permanent storage, use the Library, as

we explain in Chapter 2.) You can also store data and other nongraphical con-

tent on the Pasteboard. Content that you put on the Pasteboard doesn’t

appear in your Flash movie.

Following a timeline

The Timeline window divides your movie into

frames.

Each frame represents

a tiny stretch of time, such as ƒ

⁄24 of a second. Creating a movie is simply a

matter of assembling frames, which are then quickly played in order.

Chapter 9 explains in detail how to make using the Timeline completely pain-

less. For now, you should just understand the essentials. See Figure 1-7 for

the basic Timeline.

Figure 1-7: The Timeline is your key to managing animation.

On the left side of the Timeline is the layer list. When you open a new movie,

you see only one layer, unimaginatively named Layer 1. A

layer

is like a

sheet of transparent acetate on which you draw objects. Layers help you keep

objects from running into each other, causing unfortunate, messy results. You

organize your entire movie by using layers. For example, if you want to keep

some text constant throughout the movie but animate a bouncing dot, you

would give the dot its own layer and animate it on that layer. The layer list has

room for more layers, and you can add as many layers as you want. (Chapter 6

gives you the lowdown on layers.)

Chapter 1: Getting Acquainted with Flash CS4

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Wiley 978-0-470-38119-9 Datasheet Page 13