Steps in developing a Movie with Director

Before starting to develop your Director movie, its important to understand the developing process.

Step 1: Set up movie properties

Before starting a movie project, you need to set initial movie properties for how your movie looks and operates. It is important to specify movie property settings that affect the entire movie at the beginning of the project, such as how colors are defined, and the size and location of the Stage, so you don’t have to redesign the movie later.

Step 2: Assemble the media elements in the cast window

Media elements include graphics, images, digital videos, animations, sounds, and text. You can create new media elements in Director or import ones that have already been developed and store them in the Cast window. Director provides several tools for creating media elements, including a paint tool and text creation tools.

Step: 3 Position the media elements on the Stage and sequence them in the Score

The Stage is the viewing area you use to display where media elements appear in a movie, and the Score is the timeline you use to organize what you want to occur at the time and duration you specify. You use the Stage to create the look and feel for your production; you use the Stage and Score together to arrange the media elements from the Cast window in space and time. The Stage represents the media elements’ position in space (where) and the Score represents the media elements’ position in time (when).

Scripting allows you to add custom functionality to your movie such as moving objects on the Stage, formatting text, storing and managing information, performing mathematical operations, and controlling the movie in response to specific conditions and events, such as a mouse click.

In Director, scripts are written in Lingo, a Director-specific programming language. To save you time Director comes with ready-made scripts called behaviors. For example, interactive behaviors can include buttons, arrows, or other navigation elements that move the viewer to different parts of a movie or to different locations on the Web.

Step 5: Preview and test the movie with the Control Panel

After you create your movie, you can use the Control panel to preview and test the movie to make sure it runs the way you want it to. It’s important to test the functionality of your movie early and during the development process to catch problems and make adjustments in the Score.

Step 6: Package the movie as a stand alone projector file, or save the movie as a Shockwave file for use over the Internet.

You can package your production as a stand-alone projector movie that viewers can run from a CD-ROM or hard drive. You can also save your movie production as a Shockwave movie that viewers can play on a Web page, using a browser.

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