Subtitles of the Movie

Although this is an introduction to Flash's internal scripting language, ActionScript, this is not an introductory level treatment of Flash. Although it's not required that you have deep skills with Flash's many animation, media playback and graphic tools and techniques, I do expect that you know your way around the Flash workspace and are familiar with all of these important elements: the Flash Timeline, the Property Inspector, the Stage. I expect that you know how to publish swf files as well as make buttons and that you know something about drawing with the Flash drawing tools. I won't be spending valuable time on these important Flash elements, so if you feel you need a refresher on these basics I recommend one of my intro-level Flash courses, also published by VTC. In Flash you'll be working with a variety of file types, each with its own separate purpose, so let me review these file types right now. First one and the most important one, is the fla file type. These are the primary files you work with in Flash. The contain the basic media, timeline and script information for a Flash document. The majority of the files in the work folder are these kinds of files. Since we're studying scripting most of the scripts will be found in these fla files. You also have Media Objects. These are the graphics, text, sound and video that comprise the content of your Flash document. The Timeline is where you'll tell Flash when specific media objects should appear on the Stage. You can also add ActionScript Coding to your Flash documents to more finely control their behavior and to make them respond to user interactions. Next, we get to swf files. These are the compiled versions of the fla files. These are the files you display on a web page. When you publish your fla file, Flash creates usually an swf file and an HTML file, both for you. Projectors are next. Projectors are standalone files published from a source fla file. These can play back the content from a CD, DVD or even from an e-mail without either a browser or the Flash Player. You can create Projectors that play back in both Windows and Macs from either version of the Flash application. And lastly, we have ActionScript files. These are going to have the extension .as; you can use these to keep some or all of your ActionScript code outside of your fla files, which is helpful for code organization and for projects that have multiple authors. Let's now move on to the next section of the tutorial and start working on your first script.