Subtitles of the Movie

Introducing Interactive Layouts. When you began a QuarkXPress 8 project the first order of business is to define the media. This can be print, web or interactive. What this means to you is that you can create a job that will be printed to PDF or to an offset press, actual web pages or flash files that might be an add, a movie or some other type of interactive content. In this movie we will briefly tour the interactive options. This movie contains Work Files that are available on the course CD and for download by VTC Online University Members. Download and open the file titled Presentation. Let's get started with an overview of the Layout Options. There are three different types of interactive layouts, presentation projects are animations but they can also be containers for the other two types of projects. You could think of an image sequence as a flip book style project. Each state of the animation is contained on a separate page, buttons are interactive objects that you click or mouse over to prompt an action. All three types of layouts can be used together or separately. When we play this in a flash player we can see the animated content. The multi-state buttons allow me to start and stop, chose File, New, Project and in the resulting Dialog Box choose interactive. You might instead choose to duplicate a printer web layout and change it to interactive. This is a great shortcut if you're creating a project with much of the same text or content as your print or web layout. This new Project Dialog Box serves the same purpose as defining a print layout. Choose your type of interactivity, frame rate at which the final interactive content will play the page size and the background color. Click OK when done and then close this page since we will be using the Work Files. To create interactive content you work with the same tools as you would use for a print layout. You draw text boxes and PictureBoxes, import elements, move, resize, add shadows and more. The differences that you can add movement when you use the Interactive Palette, if you do not yet have this open, choose it from the Window Menu. There are three simple steps to remember, name the object, tell the object what to do and tell the object when to do it. Let's create a very simple animation of a balloon floating up. I'll start in the lower right corner and float toward the upper left. To start I'll select this squiggly line and name it. This is my path so I will name it BalloonPath, do not use spaces when naming items. I don't want my path to be visible so I'll choose initially hidden. Next I'll name my balloon, this will be an animation, it will display as an item on a path. I'll choose BalloonPath from the Path drop-down menu, in options I want it to Loop, but not back and forth and I want it to start when I click. I'll have it move along at a steady clip of about 100 pixels per second. Click this button to check that your balloon will be moving upward adjust if necessary. Now that we've named our two items and define the role in the animation we'll tell them what to do and when. Click the Balloon Graphic and then the Event Tab of the Interactive Palette. Notice that our two items names appear in this tab as well. Click on the Balloon Title and then from the User Event drop-down menu choose Click Up. This means that our animation will start when the Mouse Button is released. You've just completed the second step and told the animation when. From the Action Menu choose Animation and then Play from the fly-out menu. From the Animation drop-down menu choose Balloon, now you;ve told it what to do. Let's see how you've done. Click the Export Shortcut Button here in the lower left of your Project Window; it is the right most button before the scrollbar. If you've set this up the way mine is when you click in the area of the balloon the animation begins. Because you chose Loop when the Balloon gets to the top of the page the animation should begin again. When done press Command Q on a Mac or Control Q on Windows to return to QuarkXPress. This is a very simple presentation animation that you can use QuarkXPress to create animated banners for web pages, movie players for showing videos or making multi-state buttons. Interactive Layouts are a way for designers without Flash experience to create animated content for web pages or interactive projects. For more information on interactive layouts watch the VTC Video Tutorial dedicated to this feature.