Set the Stage

Serving Up Web-Friendly Animations: In a Flash

The center white space on your screen when you first launch Flash is where your movie will appear. I refer to this area as the stage. If you alter the background color of your movie, your "stage," will also change.

Since we're working on a banner, which requires specific dimensions, we'll want to set our stage dimensions at the beginning.

Choose Modify/Movie and alter the width and height information to 400 x 50 pixels, which is what we want our banner to be. The only other choice we'll make now is to change the background color.

For this example, I've chosen black. After saying "okay," the movie area on your screen will change to reflect the new size and background color.