Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, I discuss how to modify shapes created with the tools in the toolbar. Now whenever you draw a line or shape in Flash you create a line called a path and this is true regardless of which tool you use to create the shape. These paths are probably easiest to see if you use the pen tool. The beginning and end of each segment are marked by anchor points which work like pins holding a wire in place. You can see these if you choose the sub selection tool and click on the line there. There's an anchor point, notice that it's got a square end, and there's another anchor point there. The path can be opened or closed and this is important because only closed paths can be filled with the paint bucket. For example if I draw a shape with the shape tool here, notice that, that's a closed object so by selecting it and then choosing the paint bucket tool I can choose a new color and pour color into that shape. These line segments are not closed these two are closed so I can fill them. Now you can close a line segment by moving your cursor to the very beginning of the line segment and adding another segment there so that it closes it and now watch if I click on the paint bucket tool, I can go ahead and fill that closed line segment. But it will not fill if the line segment is not closed. This one is not closed so, you'll notice that I can't pour paint into that object. However I can use the ink bottle, to change the color of my line segment. Let's go ahead and select a line segment here and let's make this thicker so I can see it easier. And now let's take my ink bottle, change my stroke color and now I can change the color of that line segment as well. Now you can change the shape of a path by dragging its anchor points using the sub selection tool. You can see that clicking on the edge of that shape brings up those nodes or edit points and I can click on those points and modify my shape. Now curved line segments have additional control points called Bezier curves, using the sub selection tool I can modify those curves. These take some practice to get used to, to work with, general rule is you want to keep your Bezier curves about half the length of the line segment. So here's my line segment and I want to keep my Bezier curves, about half that, half that length there and that makes it a little bit easier to work with. To short and they're hard to work with and to long and they're hard to work with so a good rule of thumb is about halfway to the, about to the middle or halfway of the length of the line segment. While the sub selection tool is used to change the shape of your objects, the selection tool or the filled black arrow is used to move the shapes around the stage. This is kind of an anomaly of Flash, notice that I left my skin behind, let's go ahead and undo those movements. That's because I didn't double click on the shape first, double clicking on the shape includes both the stroke and the fill in the selection so I can move both. Notice that if I just click once on the polystar and move it I'll leave the stroke behind, undo that and now double click on the polystar and now both stroke and fill are selected and I can move them together.