Create an animated DVD menu

Paul Wyatt shows that Flash is a more versatile animation tool than you might think

Browsing your local bookshop, you will often find books on Flash categorised under ‘Internet’. True, Flash is a brilliant tool for creating sleek and interactive web animations and applications, but it also has a more traditional use in motion graphics.

You may be surprised to learn that Flash is used to animate most TV cartoon shows – Cartoon Network use it for a lot of character animation – and it’s also used in title sequences and TV ads.

The power of Flash is that you can export an animated sequence as a 25-frames-per-second QuickTime movie. Previous versions of Flash struggled with this option, however the QuickTime exporter has been much improved with multiple options for export. In this tutorial we’ll create a looping DVD menu using the animation tools and filter effects in Flash CS3. Then we’ll export it using the QuickTime exporter and use this movie as the background for a menu in Adobe Encore.

Click here to download the support files (13.9MB)

Click here to download the tutorial for free