Creating Flash Movies

The Internet is becoming an integral part of our lives these days. It’s difficult to browse past a website now without some eye-candy animation and some cool graphics. Flash animations are everywhere now – they are used for a quick catchy animation, adverts for popular products, games etc. Some sites are completely done in Flash that sometimes if you don’t have the Flash plugin you won’t be able to view the site!

Flash animations are powerful and fitting for the web in the sense that they are small in size but still can produce extremely complex and high-end animation – something that was hard to achieve in the traditional animated GIFs that were used during the initial years of the Internet. Thanks to the efforts of the FutureWave, the original creators of the Flash plugin, Flash became an industry standard after the company was acquired by Macromedia (Macromedia is now acquired by Adobe, but that is a different story!)

There are a bunch of tools that can help create Flash movies. Each tool suites a different audience and addresses a specific need. There are professional tools that you can let you tinker to the last bolt or wizard-driven template-rich tools that can turn you into a Flash animator in a jiffy! We’ll look at some of the prominent tools amongst those available.

Adobe Flash

URL: www.adobe.com/products/flash

Popularly know as Flash and formerly Macromedia Flash, Adobe Flash it’s the mother of all Flash tools and by far the most professional of all. The latest release is called Flash CS3 Professional – the naming convention upgraded after Adobe acquired Macromedia and its product range. The program has its own scripting language called ActionScript that provided greater flexibility in animation (sometimes its easier to script a motion rather than animating it which also provides high levels of flexibility). Newer versions include richer capabilities like XML support, imports from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, richer drawing features and sophisticated video tools. All in all, a complete package for the professional Flash developer.

Adobe LiveMotion

URL: http://www.adobe.com/products/livemotion/index.html

Released in 2000, Adobe LiveMotion was considered as the direct competition to the then Macromedia Flash. The program allowed development of vector graphics and directly export to a variety of formats like QuickTime and Flash. LiveMotion was compatible with a number of other Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator. LiveMotion was officially discontinued late 2003 due to poor sales and fierce competition from rival products. Ironically, Adobe went onto merge with Macromedia and with it the control over the Flash program.

Toufee

Toufee is a web-based Flash creation tool – the first of its kind, making it standout from the rest of the flash tools. Toufee does not require any installation, a basic registration at their site is all that you need to start. Despite the limitations of programming for the internet, Toufee manages to deliver a good set of features and built-in effects. Toufee’s interface is easy, the options are good (you can add videos to your animations) and it supports YouTube, Google videos and MySpace content. A look at the sample movies done by users of the site shows some amazing results that one can achieve with the program if one has the creativity and the right approach!. Being a web-based application, it does take a while to load between screens, but nevertheless it’s a handy tool as you can work or share your animations from anywhere.

Swift 3D

Swift 3D is an add-on tool to Adobe Flash. Swift 3D allows creation of 3D Flash animations easily and quickly. It directly integrates with Adobe Flash, has a plenty of feature-rich 3D options, great video capabilities and the results are stunning! Swift 3D is the popular choice for professional for creating truly remarkable Flash animations with 3D effects.