Flash: Consolidation
I planned and produced the simple animation above to consoldiate my understanding of the material in Lessons 2 and 3 of the Flash Journalism book. As you can see I need more practice with the graphics editing tools, Lesson 1, and yes there is space above the animation for text. The animation loops once and then stops, reload the page if you missed it.
I think I have worked out the timeline and layers, although I am still a bit in the dark about symbol editing. If you look at the layers in the timeline, the pairs of chevrons up and right and the blue lines are examples of using instances of symbols in separate layers to allow independent animation. When I imported the grid background symbol from the Lesson 2 FLA file, I found that I could not export the completed animation as compatible with Flash Player 5. Deleting the background layer solved the problem.
The plan for this work of art was hacked up on a sheet of A4 - the point is I think you will need some kind of plan of the sequence you need on paper before you start. I just sketched the sequence of images and listed the objects I thought I would need. That helps to make lists of the symbols and layers needed for the independent animations. Then I just sketched a time line to give me some idea of what happens when.
Next comes lessons 4 and 5, buttons and then making the buttons do something.