For our first lesson, we are going to a quick pass through the Flash program by making a small animation and testing it out in the browser. That should give you a pretty good idea to kind of things we will be covering over this entire series.

Now, the files should be on your desktop if you run to the default installation or of course it will be where you have indicated they should be. For the rest of the lessons, just make sure that you can find them and you will know where to begin the lesson. These series is set up so that you can work right along with me if you would like. Just open up the files and I will be covering each lessons step by step.

You can also just watch if you want. Since it is a DVD, of course you can stop it anytime to rewind and review any material we have gone over. You can even bookmark any place that you would like to return to at a later time. I have designed these lessons to take us in detail through all the aspects of Flash, drawing and managing graphics, setting up your animations and building interactivity, and of course publishing your movies.

Now for this lesson, we are going to be using the Dad’s workout and we will make a short animation starring our dad character, his going to make his work out movie. Now, there is going to be lots of tools that I am going to be covering to the series in Flash. And in this demo, I will touch on quite a few of them. But do not worry, we are going to be going to every single feature and detail in the later lessons.

I just want to give everybody a nice quick feel for how to build an animation in Flash, how to set up all the different things that we would like to see in our screen and how to get things set up for the web. Now, we have got quite a few things already dropped into our movie files. So, let us just take a look of what we have got here.

First of all, we always start with this stage area. This is going to be our presentation window. I have got a few things covering this up with graphics and these are inserted in the layers in our timeline window up here at the top. Let me just turn off these layers and you can see that the dad characters in his own layer.

I have got the room background and now, I can see the actual stage that we will be publishing for the end of our movie. I will even scale out a little bit so you can see that confined area where you are going to be setting up all the parts of that we are going to be viewing in our movie.

Now, we have got that room background. That is going to setup a little area for our character to where we are working in and of course the dad himself. Now, we are going to be seen lots of things in panels along the sides of the program in control areas. Like for instance, if I select my dad we can see in the properties window down here what kind of element we have and this one is actually referring over to our library. I have got my dad character that we are using. Our library is actually full with the whole bunch of other graphics that will be using throughout our movies. It is a great storage place for all your Flash contents.