Subtitles of the Movie

Let me start my review of Flash's various graphic creation tools. With those tools for creating lines, line drawings can be created with a pencil, pen and line tools. Each is a little bit different. Let me start off with a Line Tool. The Line Tool simply draws straight lines. You can adjust the thickness and shape and features of the line here in the Properties Inspector. Also, you can always make custom stroke styles. But it's fairly basic straight forward tool. The Pencil Tool also create lines, this is going to create free form lines. You also have options here in the Properties Inspector for controlling the line thickness and the style of the line as well as making custom strokes as well. As it is with the Pencil Tool you also have Type Pattern, Wave Height, Wave Length options here. I also recommend that you experiment with these as well as the thickness setting here. You can also zoom in to see your patterns that you're adding. In addition to the settings here in the stroke style of the Properties Inspector you've also got mode settings down here, some that I use often include the Straighten Mode, notice that with this tends to straighten the line for me. The Smooth Mode tends to create smoother lines. Then the third mode there is the Ink Mode tends to smooth the line out there. Another option over here is to move into the Object Drawing Mode which I'll be talking about a little bit later in this section. Could also create lines with a Pen Tool, let me go ahead and select the Selection Tool. Draw a marquee around all these objects then press the delete key, get a new stage here. Pen Tool is above the Line Tool. The way this works is that you simply click on the stage to create straight line segments. What makes the Pen Tool unique is that you can also draw curved line segments by clicking and dragging. Notice it down here, you've also got Object Drawing Mode as well as Snapped Objects mode. I'll be covering the Pen Tool in its own individual movie a little bit later but I wanted to include it here because you can create lines with it. Create strokes or outlines with a Rectangle and Oval Tools. The terms lines and strokes are used interchangeably in the Flash Documentation. Because you can modify it both with lines and strokes using the same tools. I'll be talking more about modifying your shapes in Flash in the next session of the tutorial. Remember the Rectangle Tool is below the Text Tool if you hold down on the tool you'll see the Oval Tool beneath it. You can't see either of the lines or strokes here on these two shapes because the stroke color chip is the same as the fill color. If I change that to a different color you'll see it. Notice that this line here is 11.5 points thick and there is the style of the line. Let's change this to a regular solid line, thinner, let's go at 5 and change the color there. Now lines and strokes are independent of fills, notice I adjust the fill here using the fill color chip. You can modify the lines or strokes using the ink bottle, the color and tool modifiers here in the toolbar. The color mixer panel by using the stroke color in the Properties Inspector. Let me go ahead and use the Properties Inspector to change this to a bright red color. Change it to a dotted line there. Let's create a new shape and this time let's turn off the stroke, so notice that there is no stroke now. But I can add a stroke back, using the ink bottle, again, you'll need to set the Properties here in the Properties Inspector. Take that no stroke and add a color now. Let's add dark blue color and by clicking on the object with the ink bottle I can change the stroke, color and style as well as thickness. Now Flash CS3 refers to strokes, lines, fills or any combination as shapes. Shapes appear as dotted meshes on the stage if I double click on them, there's the dotted mesh. And there's the dotted mesh and the Properties Inspector labels them as drawing objects. To summarize them, the Line Tool here is ideal for creating straight lines of any style. The Pencil Tool is great for drawing free form lines, in which you draw right on the stage. The Pen Tool is for more precise lines, also for lines that contain both straight line and curved line segments. The oval and rectangle tools are ideal for creating geometric shapes such as ovals, circles, rectangles and squares. Using a combination of the tools I've reviewed here, you can quickly and effortlessly create simple shapes with independent lines and fills so let me now move on to the next movie and demonstrate how to create object fills with Flash.