Syllabus

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Cirque du Soleil

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Lecture Calendar

Text Book:
Flash MX for Windows and Macintosh Visual Quickstart Guide by K. Ulrich. Peachpit Press, 2002. ISBN: 0201794810

Course Description:
This course will utilize Macromedia Flash® as a medium for the development of creative computer based animations. Both traditional and digital animation techniques will be explored such as storyboarding and frame-by-frame animation. Much emphasis of the course will be placed in displaying the capabilities of integrating a traditional medium, such as frame-by-frame animation and the power of a computer to achieve interactivity and automation of simple tasks. Other topics included in this course will deal with implementing interesting graphic user interface solutions for web design and the scripting capabilities of Flash® for the web, portfolio presentations or software applications.

Lectures:

1. Inroduction, course overview. Review of assignments and ideas for the class. What's is Macromedia Flash®. The history of animation 1.
2. The history of animation 2. How traditional animation translates to the digital world.
3. Vector graphics on the web. Tool bar, menus and basic functionality. Setting up your document in Flash.
4. Drawing in Flash. Making objects and importing objects. Vector vs. Raster graphics.
5. Animation, the time line, frame by frame animation, motion tweening and shape tweening.
6. The power of gradients. Gradient options and tools.
7. Movies, Scenes and Objects and how they interact with each other.
8. Alpha transparencies and masks.
9. ActionScript, the language of Flash.
10. Buttons and other interactive elements in your movie.
11. Saving Flash movies for the web or for a CD-ROM, pre-loaders and full screen executables.
12. Embedding Flash movies into HTML.
13. The Web and Beyond… Screen Savers and Stand-Alone Applications.
14. Flash Resources on the Web. Where to look, and how to use the tutorials.