How to Integrate Sound into a Flash Movie
Your final project in this class is required to be more extensive than the weekly lab projects. Your project should demonstrate a significant application of technical elements and also demonstrate originality and creativity. No minimum length is required, but your project will be judged based on the instructor’s assessment of the amount of creative energy required in its production. A famous quote is that: creativity is 1/3 inspiration and 2/3 perspiration. Students may work individually or in partners on this project. Choices for projects are:
- Development of a Flash movie See how to incorporate sound into a Flash Movie
or
- Development of a creative, informative web site (several linked pages produced by yourself). All web projects (meaning all the pages you produce) must reside on your Towson University user account. No pages residing on other servers will be accepted. Take a look at how to implement some advanced web page features (sound, animation, etc.) .
The project should deliver a coherent message or story. The best projects tend to result from a choice that relates to interests of the students working on the project.
| Some ideas for suitable projects | |
| Web Projects | Flash Projects |
| My home town, city, country | Seasons or changing of seasons |
| My car, pet, family | Anything that moves, e.g. car chases, air plane flights |
| Information pages about your major | Natures scenes, e.g. a day at the beach, thunderstorms |
| Information pages about your favorite sports | Sports scenes |
| Travel brochure about a destination of your choice | Information movie about your major |
| Grading | ||
| Area | Grading Criteria | Points Possible |
| Basic Content | Project shows evidence of understanding of basic Flash or MS Expression Web concepts | 20 |
| Complexity | Project shows evidence of ability to use sufficient degree of complex Flash or MS Expression Web concepts (check out the advanced concepts listed above) | 20 |
| Multimedia | Project shows sufficient use of multimedia (text, graphics, animation, video, sound, etc.) | 20 |
| Appearance | Project reflects overall theme and is appealing to the target audience | 20 |
| Creativity/Originality | Project is exciting and original | 20 |
| Total Points | 100 | |
How to Integrate Sound into a Flash Movie
Procedure
- It is a good idea to get your sound files before you start working on your card. Flash can use sound files in .mp3 format or .wav (Windows) or .aiff (McIntosh) or. The .mp3 audio format offers small file size and excellent quality. Many sound effects are in .wav format. Both formats are easy to use in Flash. However, there is also a wealth of sound files on the web and many search engines offer to search by file type (please make sure to observe copyrights).
- Incorporate sound after you are finished creating your movie.
- If you downloaded a sound file, you will need to import the sound file into the library of our Flash movie. Choose File / Import to Library, navigate to your sound file, click on OK. You can now see your sound file in the library (Window / Library).
- Sound files should have their own layer in Flash. Insert a new layer and name it “sound”. Insert the keyframe using Insert / Timeline / Keyframe at the frame where you want the sound to start.
- The next step is to actually insert the soundfile at a specific frame in our movie to start playing the sound at this particular frame. The most intuitive method to incorporate sound into your movie is the drag and drop method.
- Open the movie’s library using Window / Library if you are using an imported sound. Your sound files should be listed in the lower half of the library window. Click on the requested sound file, hold down your left mouse button and drag the file onto the canvas. A wave representing the sound appears in the sound layer.
- Select Control / Play all Scenes. Control / Rewind your movie and Control / Play it.
- If your sound file is very long and you would like to stop playing sound at a particular frame, click this frame in the sound layer and make it a keyframe. In the Properties window, select your sound in the drop down box below the Sound box and select Stop (in sync). Your sound will stop playing in this keyframe.