Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we get to the topic of Blend Modes. Blend Modes in Flash lets you create composite images. Compositing is the process of varying the transparency or color interaction of two or more overlapping objects. You can see that I have some overlapping objects here that I've attached Blend Modes to. The result of the overlapping is different color combinations. These color combinations are different than the components that go into the overlapping. Notice that I don't have any green at all in either of these two objects, yet the result of overlapping these two blends is the color green. You can add a third image here to get a darker green color, slightly darker green. Likewise, I'm getting different shades of blue based on the overlapping objects for my blue circle here. Now, blending lets you create unique effects by blending the colors in overlapping movie clips. The Blending Mode contains the following elements; the blend color, for example the green and the black; the opacity is the degree of transparency applied to the Blend Mode. You can see that this opacity is less than this opacity. The base color is the color of the pixels underneath the blend color and the result color is the result of the blend's effect on the base color. So you can see that underneath this combination I have the black color. On top of it is the blue color. The result color is the red. Likewise, here, top or the blend color is green. The base color is the yellow color and the result color is this light yellow-green. Now, Flash Blend Modes lets you create a variety of composite images. These blend modes depend on both the color of the object you're applying the blend to and again, the underlying color. Adobe in their Flash documentation recommends that you experiment with the different Blend Modes to achieve the desired effect. These modes include Normal, which applies colors normally with no interaction with the base colors. Layer, example here, lets you stack movie clips on top of each other without affecting their color. Darken, the example here, replaces only the areas that are lighter than the blend color. Areas darker than the blend color don't change. Multiply; multiply is the base color by the blend color, resulting in darker colors. Lighten replaces only pixels that are darker than the blend color. Areas lighter than the blend color don't change. Screen multiplies the inverse of the blend color by the base color, resulting in a bleaching effect. Overlay multiplies or screens the colors depending on the base colors. Hard Light multiplies or screen the colors depending on the Blend Mode color. The effect is similar to shining a spotlight on the object. Add is commonly used to create an animated lightening dissolve effect between two images. Scrolling down here this is the Adobe Help Page. Subtract is commonly used to create an animated darkening dissolve effect between two images. Difference subtracts either the blend color from the base color or the base color from the blend color depending on which has the greater brightness value. This effect is similar to a color negative. In the Invert Blend applies an alpha mask. And there's one more that's not shown here and that's Erase. Erase removes all base color pixels including those in the background image. Now, you'll apply these blend modes to movie clips as I mentioned before and you'll want to open up the Display Area here in the Properties Inspector and then notice that there's a Blending Drop-Down. So this movie clip right here has Hard Light Blend attached to it. And I can experiment with the other settings here. There's Screen, Overlay, Hard Light, Subtract. Let's add another one in here. Here is also a blending mode of Subtract applied to that orange oval there. There's Difference. Again, the documentation recommends that you experiment with these various settings to achieve the results desired. Let's go ahead and apply Normal to each of these so you can see the original images. Notice that they're interacting normally now and I can go ahead and start changing these one at a time to get different effects. That's an interesting effect right there; Screen on the picture and then Normal or Multiply for the different objects underneath it. You can have a view of these examples in the Flash Help Area. Just do a search on applying Blend Modes. This is in the section Using Flash CS4 Professional, Filters and Blends, Applying Blend Modes there at the bottom and there's some nice examples of some of the different combinations there. But probably the best way to do this is to go ahead and create some objects, convert them to movie clips and then start applying various blending modes to those objects. That will conclude then this very important section of the tutorial on working with movie clips. As I mentioned previously, to move into the more intermediate or even advanced beginner levels of Flash, you'll need to have a very strong command over movie clips so you'll want to study the content that I covered in this section carefully. Let's now move on to the next section, another very important section, Working with Text. Most websites, even Flash-based websites are composed primarily of text so we come to yet another important section where you'll learn about Flash text, text anti-aliasing, text types, spellchecking your text, text options and attributes, embedded and device fonts and much, much more.