Your very first Flash package

It takes me eight weeks to teach Flash to undergraduate journalism students. That’s starting from zero. If they do all the homework and study all the examples, they can be very good at the end of eight weeks. Mostly it takes time and dedication, rather than any special talent or computer aptitude.

When I do training for professional journalists, I don’t have eight weeks. So I always face this dilemma: Do I begin at zero, and just get them started? Or do I begin at a later point, assuming they already know certain things? (Usually I have only three to four hours in a training session!)

The trouble with running a beginner session: At the end, the attendees still can’t really make anything on their own. The trouble with running an intermediate session: Too many people in the room don’t yet understand some of the key techniques.

Yesterday I did half a day of Flash training at a newspaper, and I developed a new teaching tool for the occasion. It’s called Simple Flash Project: Single SWF and the point is for you, the student, to download the FLA and use it as a learning tool. (Go ahead, look at the SWF and then download the FLA.)

I deliberately built the SWF to leave out everything that I consider “post-beginner” in Flash authoring. So it includes NO MOVIE CLIPS. No scenes. No externally loaded assets of any kind. It also includes nothing that was drawn — the graphics are all photos.

There are three separate segments, as any news graphic might have. The SWF is only 73 KB. The entire Timeline is 80 frames long.

There are three different animations, using photographs.

Most important, there are buttons and frame labels. You’ve got to have those if you are going to create separate parts in the package. People often ask me, “How to you make it skip from one section to another?” Buttons and frame labels. That’s how.

Here’s a list of beginner Flash journalism skills. These are the skills you have to nail down before you can build a journalism package.

1. Simple animation, both tweened and frame-by-frame (Graphic symbols)
2. Importing photos and other bitmaps
3. Use of layers
4. Use of keyframes
5. Buttons — both making them and scripting them (Button symbols)
6. Use of frame labels
7. ActionScript: stop();
8. ActionScript: gotoAndPlay("framelabel");

Now, I will be the very first to admit that not everyone in the newsroom needs to learn Flash. But somebody in your newsroom should learn it! Ideally, I would say that all your news graphic artists should know everything listed above. Then, also ideally, there should be one person — artist, photojournalist, online producer — who goes beyond the list and learns how to develop more sophisticated interactive graphics.

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