How to make a movie

Making Your Own Mini Movie
We are now advancing again, we will now create our own mini movie. We will be exploring new areas of Flash.
Lets start by inserting all the layers that we will need. We will need the following layers:
Building
Car
Character
Audio
Road
Grass
Sky
Tree

These are the layers that will be required to make our mini movie. Let’s start designing these things. We will start with the buildings.
On the stage in any layer as we won’t be keeping it on the stage, draw out a few rectangles that vary in size, keep the aligned at the bottom. Now add windows to these buildings. Now add any other feature to the buildings that you think is necessary.
When you are happy with these buildings, select them all and convert it to a graphic, naming it Buildings.
Deselect the buildings than reselect them and delete them. (Q. Why did we deselect them first. A. Because if we didn’t, the image that we have put in the library would also be deleted, so to confirm that we are happy the way it is, we must first deselect the image).
We will now start by making our car. Draw a car on the stage, this can be as basic or advanced as you want. It may be just a rectangle with a couple of circles attached to the bottom of it. Convert this to a graphic also, name it Car.
Delete the car using the same method as before.
The audio that we want is the sound of a car horn, you could find one somewhere on the internet, or you could record yourself making a car horn sound, or even the sound of your own car horn.
Once you have this audio file, import it to the library, this was explained in a previous tutorial.
The road is really simple to make, make it probably a black or grey colour. We are just going to make this road another rectangle, a bit longer than the stage. You can add lines to it if you want. Now convert this to a graphic and name it Road.
Delete the road.
For the grass this is just another rectangle, and I would suggest making it a shade of green, as grass seems to have a tendency of being green. Also make this a bit longer than the stage. Now convert it to a graphic, and name it grass.
We will be trying something a little different with the sky to give it a better effect.
Click on the colour and set it to no line (the red diagonal line), than select the fill colour. This is where we will be doing something a little different. Above the library if you have it positioned on the right hand side of the workspace, click on the thing that says color. This will bring up a list of options on what to do with the color. Where it says type, most like be set to solid; change it to linear.
Now at the bottom of the colour panel there is a window that displays what the color looks like. We are going to mix two shades of blue together. Double click on one o the little squares just above the display window, now a pain panel will be displayed select one of the darker shades of blue. Now double click on the other square, and choose a lighter shade of blue. Now these squares can be slide along the bar which will control the colour and how much of the square it will take up, we want these two colours to blend nicely contrast nicely, so move them around until it looks nice and neat. You can add another colour simply by click somewhere else along the slider.
Now when you are happy with the colour, make sure it has been applied to your sky. Now select the whole sky, right click on it and select free transform, rotate it about 45 degrees so that the darker colour is on top of the lighter one, instead of them being next to each other. Stretch it out so it is a little longer than the stage, and convert it to a graphic, and name it Sky.
Last but not least the tree. Draw a simple tree on the stage, giving the leaves a shade
of green, and the trunk a shade of brown.
Convert this to a graphic and name it tree.
We now have everything we need for our mini movie, now we must insert all the animations needed.
First of all we need to work out how to fit all our props on to the stage, start by dragging the sky symbol on to the stage in the sky layer. Position it at the top of stage, we won’t worry about the size just yet.
Now the next thing we will be placing on the stage is the buildings. Place the buildings on the building layer. Make sure that the building layer is above the sky layer, otherwise the sky will hide the buildings.
Now we want the buildings to look like there on the grass, so make sure the grass layer is below the buildings layer and line the grass up with the bottom of the sky.
Next we will insert the road, which will be straight underneath the grass layer.
Now insert the car on the car layer, make sure the car layer is over the road layer, and position the car off the right of the stage. The car will have to be facing towards the left side of the stage.
Now is the time to position and size everything.
Check for the following:
No white showing. Eg. No gap between the sky and the grass etc.
Make things to scale: You obviously don’t want the car to be bigger than the buildings, and you also want the stage nice and neat.
Once you are happy with these results, it is time to add some animation to the car. This is going to be really simple. Insert a keyframe on the 10th keyframe in the car layer, on the 10th keyframe drag the car off to the left side of the stage, making sure it is still on line with the road. Now insert another keyframe at the 11th frame, the car should be off to the left of the stage. Now on the 11th keyframe, flip the car so it is facing the way it just come from, this was explained in a previous tutorial. Now insert another keyframe at frame 21. Create motion tween between frames 1 and 10, and between frame 11 and 21 1.
Test the movie, you should have a car driving across the screen, than it drives back across the screen. Congratulations, you have just made your first mini movie. Keep this file, as when you progress through these tutorials you can edit them to make them better. Now I mentioned that we would be putting the character in this mini movie. I want to leave this bit up to you, for your own good. You figure out what you want the character to do, what the character may say, and where to place him in this movie.
Well done on completing this tutorial, now move on to the next.