for educators

Welcome! There is an Instructor's Manual for this book. To get a copy, please contact the publisher, Focal Press. The manual includes three sample syllabi as well as tips and instructions for teaching with this book. The easiest way to get the manual is to e-mail the academic sales representative, Amy Langlais <A.Langlais@elsevier.com>.

To download the examples from the exercises in the book, go to the regular book downloads page. Below are some additional files just for educators to use in class. Their use is explained in the Instructor's Manual.

Audio Bonus
Links and information about gathering and editing audio for your Flash packages.

Lesson 1: Drawing Tools
Some examples of what even a non-artist should be able to do.
:: SWF (5 KB) :: FLA (44 KB)

Bonus: After your students complete Lesson 1, urge them to watch this Macromedia presentation about how to draw a cartoon character. It reinforces everything they learned from Lesson 1 and also adds new information not found in Flash Journalism. The animator uses the same shape drawing techniques (discussed in Lesson 1) to create a cartoon based on a scanned pencil sketch. The presentation is an hour long, and the latter half includes animation techniques that are covered in Lesson 2 (as well as the shape tween, which is not).

Lesson 2: Simple Animation

• Additional simple animation example :: SWF (4 KB) :: FLA (41 KB)
• Mask example :: SWF (4 KB) :: FLA (37 KB)
• Motion Guide example :: SWF (7 KB) :: FLA (38 KB)

Lesson 4: Buttons
Hit state example :: SWF (3 KB) :: FLA (42 KB)

More advanced students may be interested in how to create an invisible button.

Lesson 5: Making Buttons Do Things
Example using three frame labels and three buttons. You can use this as an example for an assignment to be completed outside class.
:: SWF (7 KB) :: FLA (75 KB)

Here's a simple additional animation I use in a class demo to reinforce the information in Lesson 5 :: SWF (2 KB) :: FLA (43 KB)

BONUS following Lesson 5
After students have completed Lesson 5, you can use this presentation (SWF, 422 KB) to review some best practices for building professional FLA files. The presentation* will open in your browser, and you need to know two things to view it in a familiar PowerPoint-like format:

Step 1: Select the "fit on screen" view.

Step 2: Use the arrows to advance the slides.

* This presentation was a PowerPoint, converted to a SWF using Flash Paper, which is included in Studio 8 from Adobe/Macromedia.

Lesson 6: Movie Clips
Students should be able to build this on their own after they have completed Lesson 6.
:: SWF (13 KB) :: FLA (76 KB)

Lesson 7: Working with Photos
Most students will want to skip over Exercises 7.1 and 7.2. You can summarize the information and show them these two SWFs as examples. Download the Word document (373 KB) to see a comparison. Admittedly there is not much visible difference between these two SWFs, but with some photos, especially at larger sizes, there can be a definite advantage to importing BMPs instead of JPGs.
:: JPG SWF (19 KB) :: BMP SWF (19 KB)

Example: Thumbnails that zoom
This example is something you could require students to do as a homework assignment. The FLA is large because the four photos are BMPs inside the file.
:: SWF (89 KB) :: FLA (2.6 MB)

Lesson 8: Working with Sound
This SWF fades a sound in and out when a button is pushed. It is provided here to help you and your students learn more about using ActionScript to control sound. The FLA is large because the sound file is a WAV inside the FLA file. Most of the script is on Frame 1. Each of the two buttons has a different script. Each button executes a function given on Frame 1.
:: SWF (38 KB) :: FLA (1.2 MB)

New (11 Nov 2005): A ready-made button that plays an MP3. Try it and see! Details and download are on another page.

PowerPoint for Lesson 8
You can download this PPS file (100 KB) and use it to introduce the more advanced ActionScript techniques used in Lesson 8 -- and which will also be used throughout Lesson 10.

Lesson 9: Fading and Moving Text
This technique uses multiple movie clips to keep the main Timeline simple. Look at the ActionScript on the final frame of each movie clip. That's where you tell the NEXT movie clip to begin playing.
:: SWF (9 KB) :: FLA (50 KB)

Modified Slideshow Lesson

Use a condensed lesson and a Flash template (FLA) for creating a photo slideshow -- if you need to fit the entire Flash instruction block into three or four weeks and don't have enough time to cover Lessons 7 through 10 in the book. Go to the slideshow download page.

Send Your Feedback

If you have suggestions for future editions of Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages, please use the contact form to send them to the author.