Customer Reviews

How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

I've read enough of this book to recommend it to others. With one MAJOR caution. To date, I've not been able to find any way to obtain the example files that normally come with the DVD. I bought the electronic version to read on my Xoom and it works ok... the electronic version lacks a table of contents but the index is nicely hyperlinked and the book is fully searchable with my Kindle reader on the Xoom.

Just missing the files on the DVD... which I normally rely on heavily as I work through something like this.

Wrote to the publisher but no response so far. I'll update this review if anything changes with this situation.

Seems to me that if I don't get the same experience with an eReader version that I get with a dead-tree version, it should be discounted even further than it normally is discounted. Hope this helps someone else...

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.

First off, I am not a flash expert by any means. Probably not even intermediate, but I am pretty good with Photoshop and Illustrator, so I figured I could jump right into this book. Let me say that I did learn a lot through this book, but I had to figure a lot of small things by myself due to some glaring errors. One thing that made it more difficult was that the DVD exercises did not always match up with the book.

For one example, in chapter 5, the section on "Sync (Classic tweens)", I had to replace a bee character animation along a guided path with a new dog character animation. The goal was that even with a whole motion tween in place, one could easily replace the character with a "swap" for the whole timeline. Except I couldn't. As soon as a new keyframe occurred, the bee would come back. After much re-reading and re-doing, I noticed the "Hot Tip" on the right of the page, which stated this trick only works with graphics and not Movie Clips. Well, I looked and the bee was a Movie Clip. That is NOT a helpful exercise. It is one where the reader rips out his/her hair and gets older trying to find what went wrong.

Other inconsistencies poped up here and there, which got very frustrating, because I didn't know if it was something I was doing wrong, or whether the book/exercises was wrong. Sometimes directions would be vague, like creating and editing a new layer, but being unclear about which layer we are now editing. I am used to working with layers in Photoshop/Illustrator, so I shouldn't be confused by this.

All in all, this book does have good "cheats" and I have no doubt the author is competent with Flash, but the book is by no means easy to get through. On the back of the book, it states the level is for "intermediate to advanced flash and graphics designers". I felt competent enough to tackle this book head on, but the issues I ran into were not about being advanced in Flash or not, but about clarity. Hopefully, this book will go through a revision and fix the issues, but until then, be careful about buying this book.

The first thing you should know about How to Cheat at Flash CS5 is this - it's not made for the brand new user who has never used Flash before. Using a simple 1 to 5 scale, one being a newbie and 5 being a pro, the book requires having at least a high level 2 to level 3 users' worth of knowledge. The book will not handhold you through much of the jargon or basic features of Flash as it already assumes you know your way in and out of the program at least a little bit.

With that out of the way, this is an awesome book for beginning to long-time users of Flash. The layout is simple and easy to understand, it's beautifully illustrated throughout with very helpful pictures and screenshots and the basic concepts are universal, no matter what version of Flash you are currently developing on. I can't honestly say that I've made it through the entire book yet (because honestly there were sections I had no real interest in) but this also is a point in the book's favor as the chapters are very compartmentalized which made for good "hunt-and-peck" style of reading.

I'm an animator/interactive designer and web developer. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I first learned Flash when it was still Macromedia Flash, long before it acquired CS in its name. The number after ActionScript was "1.0". In the ten years since Flash 5, when I opened the program for the first time, Flash has grown by quantum leaps, becoming a truly formidable animation and interactive development powerhouse. Many of the things I had to do laboriously by hand are now accomplished with a few mouse clicks. The prime example is bones and IK (inverse kinematics). We didn't have bones until CS4. Deforming shapes convincingly was really difficult, tedious, and time-consuming, requiring frustrating shape tween hints or frame-by-frame animation.

Back then, as a poor recent graduate working at dotcoms, I didn't have much money for computer books and had to figure out all this stuff on my own by trial and error or going to communities like Flash Kit. Things like masking tricks, walk cycles, motion guides. I'm happy to say that it's all in here. Chris Georgenes has distilled years of experience and knowledge into this compact volume so you don't have to go through all the pain and suffering that I did. Be forewarned however, that this book is for intermediate to advanced Flash users. It is NOT for beginners. The author says so and so does the back cover. The book is divided into chapters: Design Style, Transformation & Distortion, Masking, Motion Techniques, Character Animation, Flash to Video, Animation Examples, Working with Video, Working with Sound, Interactivity, Extending Flash. Each lesson is cookbook style, being a 2-page spread. Most of the lessons are standalones, but some build on skills learned from previous lessons. The lessons go fast. Having only 2 pages per lesson is a bit short, as I feel some of the techniques require more explanation, especially when multiple screenshots take up most of the allotted space. Also, I have a problem with the layout. The steps flow left to right across the two pages. My eyes naturally wants to read down the first page first, then onto the opposite page.

Many wonderful effects can be achieved and problems solved with the proper application of masks. If you never knew about the power of masking, you will after reading chapter 3. Some very common or frequently used ones are flag waves, a spinning globe of the continents, and handwriting (all tricks I've employed in the field). The lessons on bones and armatures can be very useful for animators not yet familiar with breaking up complex characters into animate-able component pieces like heads, arms, legs, and body. This is covered in chapter 5, with a lesson from Jib-Jab and the wonderful dancing George Bush! Chapter 7 (Animation Examples) is all stand-alone recipes, including some very frequently-requested effects like page curl, Star Wars text scroll, how to do rain, smoke, fire, fireworks, etc.

From there, the book (last 80 pages) gets progressively less useful. The chapter on Interactivity (10) should've been totally left out in favor of more animation tricks. It's quite clear here that Georgenes is an animator, not a coder. It's a tacked on chapter that is very skimpy on actual ActionScript learning and if you're new to programming, you will probably get very little out of it. It discuses differences with AS2 with side-by-side screenshots, which at this point in ActionScript's history, frankly shouldn't even be mentioned. Contrary to what another reviewer said, this chapter is not chock-full of code. This entire chapter is only 18 pages, with 4 of them being about how to toggle sound off (is it really that important to take up 4 pages?). Objects and classes, the backbone of Flash OOP (object-oriented programming), is mentioned at the END of this chapter, as a scant 2 pages, with an accompanying image of a Rubik's cube meant to illustrate that everyone solves problems in different ways, like how the pieces of the cube can be arranged in a million combinations. If you want to use cut and paste code, this is OK, but plenty of online tutorials will teach you better. For this, and the layout issue I mentioned before, I deduct 1 star. The book would've been better without it.

In summary: How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5 is a valuable book on Flash techniques and tricks that all animators should have on his/her bookshelf. If you are serious about Flash, you will need other books to supplement your learning. This book is not for coders, so scripters or even animators needing just a small bit of ActionScript understanding will have to go elsewhere, like Colin Moock's intimidating but necessary Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential). A very basic thing to do is detect user input, but the lesson on event listeners (detecting mouse clicks, rollovers, mouse movement) is a measly 2 pages, like every other lesson.

A great companion book for animators, but clearly not the be-all and end-all of Flash books. Highly recommended, with the above caveats.

This book assumes you are already very proficient in Adobe Flash, and it just hits the highlights and shows some new tricks. I'm still very new to Adobe Flash and this book is just too confusing. I'll savce it for a time when Flash isn't so frustrating.

Unlike the namesake of this book, "Cheats", this book is not a simple guide of shortcuts. This is a book covering a broad range of Flash topics, that everything from beginners to seasoned vets will find useful information on. Topics covering design, masking, animation, video, sound, interactivity and even 3rd party apps. There is something here for everyone. As any top notch computer learning book of this class it has a DVD with the book that includes flash source files for learning along with and flash extensions.

Being a CGI animator, I especially respected the section dedicate to flash animation in this book. Flash is not my native animation toolset, I am used to working in 3D full time. A lot of my general knowledge transfers over but the technical tricks are sometimes not always obvious. I needed this book to learn some of the more complex areas of flash animation. This book gave me a ton of great info to improve my flash animation work. I really enjoyed reading the section on "bone tools" which translate very much to my CGI knowledge. There is also a section dedicated to teaching "motion guides" which are the types of animation techniques used on the Jib Jab videos. I particularly like that the author takes the time to teach beginner level things like basic animation rules. That makes this book ideal for everyone of all skills levels and is a testament of how well thought out this book is.

Another helpful section, for the more advanced users, is the section dedicated to interactivity. This is ideal for budding flash game makers or people making very dynamic flash sites. Lastly, the section on "extending flash" gives great ideas on other applications to look into to get more out of your flash, like Flashjester, Swift 3D, Ik'motion, toon boom, just to name a few.

While I would not call this a purist learning book for the brand new beginner looking to learn from scratch; It would however, make an ideal companion to other flash books for extending your knowledge above and beyond purist learning books. Moreover, it gives a lot of inspiration and creative tricks on how to pursue your own projects. I particularly respect the knowledge and wide palette of topics covered by the author. I can highly recommend this book to fellow flash users if your looking for a little creative inspiration and fresh ideas. Happy animating!

There are a lot of good tips and ideas in this book, but I didn't find it very user friendly. The book does require you to have some preexisting Flash knowledge, which seems to translate to the author assuming that there are a fair number of things you'll just know to do that are not spelled out. For me this led to a lot of confusion in terms of doing what at a given point in the timeline.

A lot of the time I spent trying to learn the techniques in this book were spent first reading the instructions, then squinting at the small pictures of the Flash timeline inside the book, then digging out the CD and finding the completed file to see how it was really put together.

The content is very focused on creating complex animations that you would use in cartoons or games. This is either extremely useful or barely useful, depending on what you need to do with Flash.

This book assumes you know how to use Flash and other software components that may be needed when you use Flash. It assumes you are fairly savvy Adobe CS4, so it can show you the differences in CS5.

It shows numerous examples of how to achieve certain artistic effects and qualities when designing your own characters, logos etc. Most instructions are only 2 pages long. There is lots of color and examples in this book.

I wouldn't call it cheating in CS5, but more like "how to create effects in simple ways you may not have thought of before."