BP12_Flash CS4 & CS5_Post1

For my Practical Experience assignment this week I decided to become more familiar with Flash CS4 and CS5. We were provided with the Adobe CS4 master collection as part of our EMDT program and I had been using CS3 in my classroom but will have CS5 in my lab at the beginning of this school year. Adobe CS5 was released the same month as starting this program and I am curious as to what differences there are. I have very minimal previous experience with Flash but it has been years. There are a couple reasons that I chose to become more familiar with this particular program. (Aside from getting into the month that we will be using it at Full Sail and panicking.) I teach Graphic Design and stick predominately to print media because even with my students with me two hours a day for two years it still not enough time to learn everything. However, we know have our Multi Media class back and the instructor and I are going to try and build a platform to tie our two programs together. I believe Flash would be a nice start and a cross collaborative tool between the two programs. In order to incorporate Flash or options to do so for my interested students it might be a good idea for me to at least become moderately proficient in the program.

My first task was to watch several tutorials by Todd Perkins, called Flash Professional CS5 Essential Training via lynda.com. I spent a couple hours going through the first three chapters of the tutorial lessons, Introduction, Getting to Know Flash and Drawing Basic Shapes. One of the things I love about Adobe is that if you are familiar with any of their other design platforms (Illustrator, Photoshop etc…) I personally feel the other applications they offer are pretty easy to figure out. Tool icons and functions are relatively the same. I found this first step in my mission to be a nice refresher of some things I vaguely remembered. The next step will be to work through the chapter on Moving Beyond Basic Shapes and Working with Layers and Timeline. My goal is to at the very least be able to post a simple animation/motion graphic developed in Flash in my third post. I might have to skip ahead in some of the tutorials to chapter eight which explains how to create frame-by-frame animations.

I opened the program and started playing with some of the tools to navigate the environment. Being an Adobe user for years and stuck in my ways about a couple things I had to move the tool palette to the left side. Below is a screen shot of what I was doing in Flash.