14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chris has done it again everything you need to know is right here!, August 17, 2010
This review is from: How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation (Paperback)
How to Cheat in Flash CS5 is the kind of book that can help you out if you are unsure about something for a project you are working on. This book will keep you busy for plenty of hours if you follow every chapter with the actual lesson on the cd that comes with it which is packed will flash extensions, example files, and demos of Flash CS5's powerful new features. This book is designed to let you know which version of flash is required to do the exercise. It will either have a flash cs3, cs4, or cs5 icon. So what does that mean? Simple. It means you need Flash CS5 to do everything in the book and why wouldn't you want to have the latest version of flash when it has so much more features to offer then any other version.
So the book is as follows:
Chapter 1: Design Styles
Chapter 2: Transformation and Distortion
Chapter 3: Masking
Chapter 4: Motion Techniques
Chapter 5: Character Animation
Chapter 6: Flash to Video
Chapter 7: Animation Examples
Chapter 8: Working With Sound
Chapter 9: Working With Video
Chapter 10: Interactivity
Chapter 11: Extending Flash
Chapter 12: What's New In Flash CS5
-----------My Thoughts on Each Chapter---------------
Chapter 1: Design Styles
This is great for anyone who never used flash alot of basic drawing and navigation but a real jewel in this chapter is the explanation of how to use the art deco brush, the 3d brush.
Chapter 2: Transformation and Distortion
Squash and stretch is something every animator needs to learn, 3d rotation shows how advanced flash has become, warping is a great tool for quick manipulation of an animation.
Chapter 3: Masking
This chapter has alot of fun feather and blurring masking techniques including making a flag wave in the wind.
Chapter 4: Motion Techniques
This has an in depth look at the motion editor, bones, 3d motion tweens, and adding shadows to your animation, as well as blurring animation tricks. Needless to say this is a very important chapter.
Chapter 5: Character Animation
Simple walk cycles, advanced walk cycles, looping backgrounds, this chapter has alot of useful exercises in it which I encourage anyone who is serious about animation to learn. It also has a great audio lip syncing exercise to get your vocals to sync with your animation which is just as important as a good cartoon itself.
Chapter 6: Flash to Video
CS5 video templates explained. How to get you animation ready for the big screen which it hopefully ends up on including hdtv. Which colors are safe to use. How to export you flash document into quicktime and other formats.
Chapter 7: Animation Examples
How to make a complex animation such as a sausage grinder in CS5 from drawing the shapes to knowing which symbols to group together to the animation itself. How to use the bone tool and spray brush in unison great technique when you have to animation several small objects that are a like. Cool page turn trick, how to create fire, snow, rain, steam, fireworks, and much more.
Chapter 8: Working With Sound
Like I said before sound is just as important as your animation. Different sound applications explained. Dynamic as3 sounds to add life to your animation and user interactivity.
Chapter 9: Working With Video
How to import video in every version of flash. A short but very useful chapter.
Chapter 10: Interactivity
This is for the the real coders out there. As3 and As2 actionscript covered. This chapter basically dives deep into user interactivity. Dragging objects, pausing the timeline, loading images, toggling sound on or off, and event handling.
Chapter 11: Extending Flash
Crazy amount of flash extensions which will make you fall in love with the best program even more. There are plenty of extension packed on the cd to make your workflow ten times as fast for those tedious tasks that we hate to sit through. You can make your own desktop app with flash jester and create some sweet 3d effects with swift 3d.
Chapter 12: What's New In Flash CS5
Publishing your flash product for the iphone in no time. The spring tool explained and it shows you just how important this tool really is. Text layout framework is a easy way to layout multiple paragraphs that are linked to each other.
My overall view:
I don't need any other book when it comes to animating in flash. Everything I need is literally in this book. I don't understand something I can look at the actual file on the cd. Great reference and hours of fun.
What I want in future books by Chris Georgenes:
I want to see more animation examples like panning with the camera and how to put together a short and then animate it from start to finish. More advanced animation tutorials such as morphing objects, and compiling a full character, 360 turns, and jumping animation.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's Not Cheating!, December 6, 2010
This review is from: How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I'm going to keep this review short: If you've created a few animations in Flash, and are ready to become an expert, this is your book. It won't teach you how to use Flash, but rather how to become an advanced Flash animator.
Specific examples:
* The 6 pages on Walk Cycle and Advance Walk Cycle are awesome. Finally a simple way to make characters look right when they are walking.
* Four pages on lip syncing! For me, the Character Animation chapter alone was worth the price of the book.
* The chapter on Flash Video is a real eye opener, although too brief. I had no idea that Flash was used to create feature length animation for television, but it is.
* The Masking chapter was particularly instructive for me. I wasn't paying attention on Masking day in Photoshop class, so it's always been somewhat mysterious for me. This chapter shows you how to use masks, and in particular imported Photoshop and Illustrator files, to make stunning animations.
* The Motion techniques chapter shows you how to pull it all together with bones and tweens and spans and blurs and shadows and...
When you read this kind of book, you want to try the things you learn right away. The included DVD has Flash files and source graphics for many of the examples used in the book. This is a great way to try things immediately without having to gather artwork and build all the timelines and tweens and everything else from scratch.
Summary: If you are a Flash beginner, don't buy this book (yet). But if you already know your way around the timeline and want to create great animations, this book shows you how.
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