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Macromedia Flash Work Practices

I thought I might put together some of my work practices. These are the steps I put in place to facilitate a good efficient work flow in Flash. These are my tips. I have found they have worked for me. It’s a matter of learning these practices so that you do not think about it. Just like driving a car. Then you can concentrate on being creative and working efficiently and quickly within Flash without having to worry about whether you are on the right layer or you have grabbed the wrong Graphic or you have 2 objects to tween on the same layer and you are scratching your head wondering why the tween wont work.

Create A Graphic.

The first thing you do is to create a graphic in Flash. Say you are going to make a circle.

Draw the circle, then go to the select arrow tool and drag around the whole circle including the outline. If you click on the circle to select it, 9 times out of 10 you will select only the fill inside and leave out the outline circle. And then wonder why your tween wont work. Doh!

So rule number 1 is :

USE THE ARROW SELECTION TOOL TO DRAG SELECT THE WHOLE OBJECT.

Then when you have got the drawn item selected by dragging around it. Hit Key F8 (Convert to symbol) and Tick the Graphic Radio Button and name it. I usually use the suffix _gr after a graphic, just so I know that it is a graphic. If I am making a button, I use _btn and a Movieclip I use _mc.

e.g.

Graphic = redcircle_gr

Button == stop_btn

MovieClip = bigCar_mc

Now back to where I was before I went off on a tangent. I hit key F8 to convert the drawing to a graphic. Drawings by themselves are useless. You cant do anything with them , you cant tween or control with programming (Actioncscript in Flash). So make sure you create either a Graphic or a Movieclip so that it is usable.

Ok. So now we have created a greenball_gr and it is on its own layer. Make sure that you have one object per layer. If we are going to tween them later, the tweens wont work unless there is only one Graphic object per layer. If you have two or more it just wont work. !!111!!!

So , lets tween our little ball. We want to move it across the screen. Click on frame 20 and hit key F6 (Insert -> Keyframe). Now move the ball on frame 20. You should have a keyframe on frame 1 and frame 20. We are going to tween or move the ball between frame 1 and 20. Right click on a frame , say frame 10, between the keyframes and select “Create Motion Tween”. You should have an arrow going from frame 1 to frame 20 on your timeline on layer 1. Now hit enter Key and it will move across the Stage. Flash.

That is what is meant by tweening. Now for the next step which is very important.

Double click on your layer name and rename the layer, Call it Green ball or something that lets you know what you are doing on that frame when you come back later and have forgotten what everything is doing.

AND, now for the most important work practice in Flash after using the arrow selection tool to select and name your Graphic is … taaa daaah…

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