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

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 StylesChapter 2: Transformation and DistortionChapter 3: MaskingChapter 4: Motion TechniquesChapter 5: Character AnimationChapter 6: Flash to VideoChapter 7: Animation ExamplesChapter 8: Working With SoundChapter 9: Working With VideoChapter 10: InteractivityChapter 11: Extending FlashChapter 12: What's New In Flash CS5-----------My Thoughts on Each Chapter---------------Chapter 1: Design StylesThis 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 DistortionSquash 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: MaskingThis chapter has alot of fun feather and blurring masking techniques including making a flag wave in the wind.Chapter 4: Motion TechniquesThis 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 AnimationSimple 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 VideoCS5 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 ExamplesHow 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 SoundLike 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 VideoHow to import video in every version of flash. A short but very useful chapter.Chapter 10: InteractivityThis 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 FlashCrazy 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 CS5Publishing 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.

This book bypasses all the complicated procedural language seen in most Flash manuals, mainly because it was written by someone who actually uses Flash, and has written this book for human understanding, unlike most manuals, which are written by software engineers and quite frankly, are boring, and never quite answer the basic question . . . how do I do that. I would have to say that this wonderfully illustrated book, by Chris Georgenes, will renew your interest in, and use of, a fabulous software, and do so with superb step-by-step color illustrations. The title caught my eye, but it's not really cheating. It's simply a great guide on how to animate objects and do all sorts of text motion with Flash, and it restored the enthusiasm I once had for Flash, but lost, because I found it so tedious and difficult to work with, mostly because the books I was using were too complicated, or their approach was so dull that I lost interest and gave up. That has all changed now, and this will not be the last How to Cheat book I will buy, that's for sure.-- Thomas Ormsby [...]

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.

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...

This is an animation book that not only gets straight to the point. It also does it in an entertaining and seemingly effortless manner. The author Chris Georgenes (a very talented designer, animator and writer) skillfully takes you through a graphic rich experience, whilst allowing you the luxury to work from cover to cover or jump in anywhere between.As a keen user of Adobe Flash, this book has not only proved to be a good read, it's also become a bit of a design companion, traveling with me as an essential part of my toolkit.  How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS5: The Art of Design and Animation

I bought this book to help increase my overall knowladge of Flash CS5. And its done just that. Its easy to read, easy to follow. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who uses Flash in there day to day work flow. All the little extra's that are on the cd are very inspiritional. I've read the book back to back twice and know I'm working though each chapter. I'm finding new ways to increase my workflow pipeline and new ways to workout issues. thanks Chris for writing this book! looking forward to whatever you come out with next, I know it'll be great!

It's a very good book for those who want to put their hands into Flash quickly. I recommend it for all kinds of readers interested in this issue.

Very good if you already have some experience with flash as it can be a little tricky to understand otherwise!

Great

good price

I've used flash, and have experience with other graphics programs - but I felt that when it came to flash animations I was always doing things the hard way... or at least not the shortest way. I picked up this book in the hopes that it would teach me some quick and useful tips for speeding up my workflow - and it has! I'm really enjoying this book. The way that the material is presented is wonderful. Lots of colorful graphics, not too text heavy - just enough to get the point across. Plus it points out the short-cut keys for everything. This seems like a simple thing - but I've had many ah-ha! moments for simple things. (such as holding down the shift key when doing free-transforms to constrain it to 45 degree rotations)If you're familiar with Flash, and want to learn some new tricks and even get some graphical inspiration - I highly recommend this book.