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How to Create a News Package

Using ActionScript 3 from within Adobe Flash, I created this movie using a dynamic textbox and externally loaded text files. The movie itself demonstrates how to make a news package for a television newscast. There are several steps to creating a package, but I broke the process into ten different components.

I first started by creating a Cascading Style Sheet for the dynamic textbox. This StyleSheet automatically applies the same style to all ten text files when they are loaded into the movie. I wanted to give the movie an interface similar to a computer program so I chose to model it after the Windows Vista operating system. I did this by taking a screenshot of a window that was open on my computer. I then took screenshots of both an empty folder and a folder with documents in it to create my buttons.

In Flash, I designated the empty folder as the "Up" position of the button, the full folder as the "Over" position, and the empty folder again for the "Down" position. I created a "Hit" area on the button to contain just the folder image and not the text of the button. After all of my buttons were created, I had to link the text files that they were associated with to my movie. I did this by inserting a dynamic textbox that would display different text each time a button was pushed. Now as a user clicks on each button, he or she will receive a tip that is helpful in creating a television news package.