Types of FreeHand Movies

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After spending considerable time and effort on your concept, you can make your FreeHand movie in several different ways. After you decide on a method, it's a matter of producing the artwork and making a selection in the Movie Settings dialog box. The differences are defined by the way you want to create frames. You have three choices, Page, Layer, or Page and Layer.

The chief lesson in this chapter, however, is that controls you apply through the Movie Settings panel remain in effect until you change them, either during a session, or between separate movies. If you have completed a movie using Layers animation in the Movie Settings panel, and you export a movie that was built a week ago using Page and Layers animation — without changing the settings — the movie will not work. You must always open the Movie Settings panel, make the animation choice for the particular movie, and then test or export the movie. I've made a habit of labeling my Pasteboard area with the type of animation.

Page animation

By definition, making a movie with pages requires the action to move from page to page instead of relying on layers. To make the action work, you can set the frame rate slow enough to time the viewer through the movie, or you can supply interactive buttons to push the viewer along. You can apply Flash actions to elements on pages that alter the course of the movie, or you can simply have the movie run from page one to the end. When the work is complete in FreeHand, you can save the document as an SWF file, which you can place on a Web site, or a CD. Alternatively you can send it as an e-mail attachment that can be viewed with Flash Player. The FreeHand document can be imported into Flash. Each page becomes a scene or a frame, depending on how you set the attributes in the Movie Settings dialog box. With that in mind, this form of document preparation can be utilized to set up the skeletal structure of a Flash movie. When you export the final movie in SWF format, you will have a separate file (consecutively numbered) for each page in the movie. It's extremely important not to rename any of the pages, or Flash Player will not be able to find the correct links.

Layer animation

Layer animation is artwork placed on successive layers of a FreeHand document. When you export this document as a SWF file, each page becomes a scene, and each layer becomes a single frame. Just as in a page animation, you can apply Flash actions to various elements that cause the movie to stop, play, print, go to full-screen animation, load or unload a movie, start a movie, or go to a specific page and layer. When this type of movie is exported as an SWF file, you'll get a separate file for each page in the movie. Don't rename any of these pages either.

Page and layer animation

Page and Layer animation is versatile, as it uses both pages and layers to provide a rich bag of tricks to use on the viewer. Each page is a scene, and layers are individual frames. With this method, you can have multiple animations playing on different pages, or have static pages sprinkled with an animation here and there. You have the added benefit of using Flash actions on the frames or pages that enable you to let the viewer change the course of the movie. The one problem you'll have with Page and Layer animation is that Start, Stop, and Drag don't work quite the way you'd imagine; the entire page moves, instead of a single object or group. This type of movie produces a single document when it's exported as an SWF file.

Flash action concepts

There are seven useful Flash actions that you can use in a FreeHand movie. You apply these actions from the Navigation panel, in the Action drop-down menu. Select an object or group of objects in the FreeHand document, and choose the desired action from the menu. Some of the actions, such as Go To, Print, Load/Unload Movie, and Tell Target, have additional parameters that you must satisfy in the Navigation panel. These parameters appear when applicable; they include page and layer information, events, and other actions such as Play, Stop, Go To, and Print. If you're a Flash user, most of the Flash actions will be familiar. If you're new to Flash, an explanation is in order:

• Go To — This action takes the viewer to a particular page and layer (frame or scene) in your movie.

• Play and Stop — The names are pretty self-explanatory, but these commands make a movie start or stop when a particular event occurs. This event could be a mouse event, or when the movie reaches a particular frame in the movie (frame event).

• Print — To print frames from a movie, this ActionScript must be used to specify which pages can be printed. There's an additional section in the Movie Setup dialog box that enables you to set the quality of print output.

• Full Screen — It's polite to let the viewer see your movie at the size you make it, but if you want to take over the entire monitor you can use this to put the movie into full-screen mode. No menu bars or controls are visible; the viewer must press the Escape key to stop the animation and return the use of the monitor to normal.

• Start/Stop Drag — Using this ActionScript lets the viewer drag (or stop dragging) a specific movie clip around the movie's window.

• Load/Unload Movie — If you have a document that contains two or more pages, you can load additional movies into RAM while the current movie is playing. This can prevent unwanted delays while the movie is spooling up. Unload Movie dumps the movie from the computer's RAM.

• Tell Target — If you load another movie or movie clip while your current movie is playing, Tell Target controls them (in FreeHand 10 only). FreeHand allows only one level of loaded movies, so you can only load one movie at a time.

Now that you've got a basic understanding, you can get down to specifics.

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