Subtitles of the Movie

Let me now give you some information to help you work with the Director workspace. Understanding the workspace is really a matter of understanding the Director metaphor under which it operates. The Director user interface is designed around a movie metaphor. Each project that you create can be thought of as a movie with a cast of characters, a score, a Stage where the action takes place and a director, which will be you, the author. Each media element that appears in your movie, whether it's a sound element, a video, images, text, buttons and much, much more can be thought of as a member of the movies cast. Here you'll see the little icon at the top called the Cast Window and you'll notice that it has little boxes where each of these cast members can be placed. Notice that if I create a graphic here on the Stage using one of the tools here in the tools panel, that graphic image thumbnail is placed up there in the first position of the Cast Window. There's another cast member now that's here in the Cast Window. Now, the action in a Director movie takes place in a window here called the Stage. That's where I've drawn these images here. To create a Director movie, you can add cast members, which are also media elements to the Cast Window by creating them in Director as I just did or by importing them. Now, as with a real movie, each Director movie has a score. The score is this section up here. You can see that these are the actual cast members that I created and they're placed on the Score. The score is like a time line here is what it's actually called in other authoring applications. Time is represented moving forward from left to right. So the score window here in Director contains information about when and where each of the cast members appears on the Stage. So, for example, right now I have a current time indicator, which is this red rectangle and you can see that this number one, this is called a Sprite, is represented by this right here on the Stage. So it's going to be on the Stage up until frame 30 and then it disappears. Notice that it's no longer extended out to this frame so there's nothing on the Stage. And then as I move over to Sprite number two, you can see that cast member here on the Stage. Actually it's called a cast member in the Cast Window and once you drag it from the Cast Window onto the Stage it becomes a Sprite. Notice that now there's a second copy of that first cast member there. A Sprite is simply a copy of a cast member that appears on the Stage. Then you refine the actions of the Sprites by editing them on the Stage or in the Score. So let me now move on to the next movie and go over in more detail elements of this Director workspace.