1. Open Flash and start a new document.

2. From the Property Inspector, enter the size of your stage. In this case, I'll use 300 x 200 pixels.

3. The whole premise behind this Flash Logo is that we're going to have the words fly into place from a number of different directions.

4. Rename Layer 1 to "GEC". Off the stage to the left, select the text tool and type the text "GEC". Adjust size and colour appropriately.

5. In frame 30, insert a keyframe. (F6, Insert - Keyframe, RightClick - Keyframe) The duration of this animation is therefore 30 frames. Note that the range is grey at this point.

6. In frame 30, position the text to the exact point where you wish it to end. (Holding the SHIFT key down will constrain to a straight line.)

7. Select this layer and tell Flash to create a "Motion Tween". The timeline should have a solid line indicating movement from Frame 1 to Frame 30. Use the scrubber bar to see the animation. CTRL-ALT-R will reset the scrubber head to Frame 1; pressing Enter/Return will play the animation.

8. Add a new layer (name it computers) and position the play head to Frame 1. Off the stage and on top, type the text "Computers". Adjust font and colour. Insert a keyframe at Frame 30 and move this text into its final position.

9. Finally, from the right and off the stage, enter text and move "in the Classroom" from right to left. Onion skinning or using the playhead will give you an idea about alignment.

10. Once the text of the logo is in place, we want the month to come into place from the bottom up. In this case, we have to be careful of the timeline. In this case, the month will come into place from Frames 30 to Frames 60.

11. Test your movie.

12. We have a problem. The first text only plays from Frames 1 to 30 and then disappears while the date plays from Frames 30-60. How do we solve this?

13. Test your final movie. Looks good.

14. The movie will not play without Flash until you create a standalone version of the movie. This is done from the File Menu.

15. You can play your movie from your computer. It no longer requires the Flash environment. However, it does loop over and over. Since our ultimate goal is to put this into a webpage, we'll control it with Dreamweaver MX.

16. Let's bring it into Dreamweaver MX. From the Insert Menu, select the Flash icon and locate your file. Check out the Property Inspector. In particular, there are two settings that are chosen automatically for us. One is "Autoplay", which is good. We want our movie to play when it's loaded. The second is "Loop". Let's turn that off. This will force the browser loading this page to play it only once.

17. Flash MX has a coloured stage. Usually, you'll want to choose the same colour for your stage that you do for your webpage. However, if you wish to to run this over a textured background, you want to make the background transparent. Under parameters, you'll enter "wmode" for the parameter name and a value of "transparent". Save your page and test it out!

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