Hour 13. Creating Special Effects

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to paint with bitmaps

• Special effects you can apply to text that's converted to shapes

• Practical uses for Flash Professional 8's filters

• Advanced masking special effects.

This is the last hour in the animation part of the book (not that you won't do any more animation but you'll get into more interactive and web features). As such you'll get a chance to take the knowledge gathered over the last few hours and apply it to practical exercises. This hour is comparable to Hour 5, "Applied Layout Techniques," where you combined the graphics creation skills acquired in the first part. Here you'll create animations using frame-by-frame animation, tweens, sounds, and layers. This hour should both be fun and serve as an affirmation of how far you've come in the first half of the book.

Very few new details about Flash will come up this Hour. Instead, the exercises concentrate on specific effects you'll likely need to communicate to the audience. Arguably, some of the tasks this hour border on cliché or gratuitous. That's okay. It's fine to study even copy what others have done while you're learning. It's not likely you'll use these exact effects on a real project, but you'll certainly apply the techniques.