Flash Exercise 3

FOCUS News package with animated graphic

PURPOSE Show your competence with movie clips and all skills acquired in the first six Lessons.

VALUE 5 points (see Grading):

DETAILS Create a new, original SWF with journalistic content about NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This subject gives you the opportunity to use extensive NASA resources (including this and this) so that you can produce a professional-style package entirely in Flash.

This can be a very impressive portfolio piece for you if you pay attention to the journalism: What should the package communicate to an audience?

Requirements

*A moving background, like the clouds in Exercise 6.2, would be an example.

Instructions

  1. Create an entirely new FLA for this assignment.
  2. Research your subject matter and collect the necessary assets (images and facts) from the NASA site. Do not plagiarize. Write in your own words.
  3. Create four entirely different informational segments -- each one with its own frame label and its own stop(); action (see Lesson 5). Each one must have different text and images. THESE CAN BE VERY SIMPLE.
  4. Demonstrate your understanding of design principles (alignment, good use of typography, color theory) in each segment (segments are like pages, or slides).
  5. Place your buttons on the Stage. Script each button to go to a different one of your four segments.
  6. Create your sliding panel movie clip and place it on a layer in the Timeline ABOVE the four segments (so that it is never covered up by anything).
  7. Test your movie very thoroughly.
  8. Copy the SWF, the HTML file and the FLA into your Web folder (this means the folder on your hard drive that you defined in Dreamweaver as your site folder).
  9. Upload all three files to your Web site.