I made this Flash e-learning project years ago for a college assignment. It’s fully animated with quiz sessions by a bogus Bill Cosby. For some reason, even though I put a ton of work into it and everybody liked it, I never thought much of it myself. Now, several years later I pulled it back up and laughed my ass off.

It’s been sitting on my server all ready to show off for years, but I thought I’d give a shout out to it on this blog. Maybe someone can learn something!

Check out The Life of Shakespeare

1. Draw, or open up something you want to shade. In this case, I have Rick’s head from Vote4Oz

2. Using the eyedropper tool (I), select the main color.

3. Open up the color picker, and slide the bar on the right down slightly so that you end up with a slightly darker shade of the color.

4. Select the fill of your object

5. Now, choose the brush tool (b), and in the options portion of the toolbar, select Paint Selection

6. Run your brush over the area you want shaded, only what you have selected will be affected by the brush, so go nuts.

And there ya go. She’s a beaute.

Note: If you don’t already, using the keyboard to switch between tools will save you tons of time in Flash. With this technique, toggling between the brush tool and the selection tool using B and V on the keyboard will make you an efficient shading machine.

However, a fellow named Sham Bhangal wrote a little application using actionscript that allows us to have a virtual camera that can be animated within scenes.

There is also a fairly in-depth article (regarding v-Cam use and more so: the code) here. If you’re handy with actionscript and are looking for a little more detail on the vCam, you may prefer to start there.

But if you’d like a quick start with the vCam then download the this file and continue reading.

Set the vCam to Your Stage Size

1. Open vcam.fla that you downloaded from the link above.
2. Copy the vcam movieclip symbol and paste it into your movie on a new layer (this layer should always remain the first layer).


Note: All the code the vCam needs to function is within itself. Whenever the vCam is on the stage it takes affect, and when it’s removed flash will treat it like it was never there.

3. It’s important that you set the initial size of the vCam to the size your of your stage. Vote4Oz is a 640×480 movie so you’ll notice if you downloaded the file above that the vCam’s dimensions are 640×480. If this is not done, your movie may appear distorted when running through the vCam.
4. Panning: Apply a normal motion tween to the vCam. Whatever the vCam passes is over will be what’s shown on screen.

Note: You can move the vCam off the stage itself, and it will still work. Keep this is mind.

5. Zooming: Tween the vCam smaller to zoom in, larger to zoom out.