Flash and Director are two multimedia authoring programs made by Macromedia.
Director has animation capabilities as well as a powerful scripting language and many other features that make it the industry standard for creating interactive multimedia. It's a complex program and beyond the scope of this seminar.
Flash is much more focused on animation. It's a simpler and more elegant program which is actually fun to use. Flash is the main focus of this seminar.
Both Flash and Director are capable of creating stand-alone programs, called "movies," which might best be distributed on CD-ROM. They're also capable of creating content for the Web. Movies made for the Web are called "Shockwave movies." Shockwave is not really a format so much as a brand name. There are two types of Shockwave movies: those made with Director and those made with Flash.
For an example of a simple interactive Shockwave movie made with Director, see http://www.rox.com/b/mime/game/game.html.
Here's an example of a very simple Shockwave Flash movie:
Unlike animated GIFs, Flash animations are vector-based -- they're made of lines and curves rather than a grid of pixels. This means that the same animation can be enlarged with no loss of resolution:
Vector graphic files are also much smaller than those with pixels. This is a big plus when putting files on the Web, where smaller is almost always better.
Although Flash can be used for frame-by-frame animation, this particular example was created through by tweening. Instead of drawing each frame, the first and last frames were created and the computer figures out all the frames in between (thus "tweening" the animation).
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first frame |
...lots of tweened frames... |
last frame |
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Tweening saves time and makes simple movement very easy to animate.