Chapter 1. Director MX 2004 Basics

What You Will Learn

In this lesson, you will:

• Become familiar with the Director development environment

• Create your first movie

• Learn about panel sets and set up your own workspace

• Set cast and movie preferences

Approximate Time

This lesson should take you about 90 minutes to complete.

Lesson Files

Media Files:

None

Starting Files:

None

Completed Files:

None

This is the first lesson in the Portfolio Presentation Project. During the course of the next five lessons, you will build a movie that displays samples of your work using many of Macromedia Director's capabilities, such as animation, sound, and video. At the end of the project, you'll publish the movie to a CD-ROM that can be shown to prospective employers, clients, or just about anyone with a computer.

Media assets provided on the CD were created by Jessey Vigue of blurredistinction (www.blurredistinction.com) as part of her own portfolio. She has graciously allowed us to use her artwork for this course, although if you have art of your own to use, by all means do so.

The completed portfolio project

In this lesson, you'll take a tour of Director's Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Although we won't go into too much detail in this lesson, we will touch upon many of its important aspects. Director has its share of specialty tools, but it shares a set of common interface elements with other Macromedia products in the MX line. This commonality makes it easier for people to go back and forth between different applicationssomething you will end up doing many times on some projects.