New Masters of Flash is both a global showcase and practical tutorial. Nineteen of the planet's most awe-inspiring Flash designers share their influences, ideas and objectives in individual introductory essays. They then take the reader through a step-by-step tutorial explaining in detail how to create in Flash 5 the interfaces, applications and effects that they have made famous. The author-designers are some of the most legendary Flash innovators currently working--from the U.S. to Japan, Europe to South Africa: Yugo Nakamura, Joshua Davis, Manuel Clement, Irene Chan and Tomato Interactive's Joel Baumann, together with 14 other leading Flash practitioners. These are the designers who are expanding the horizons of interactive interface design with Flash. Join them! With the book is a CD-ROM containing animated movie versions of the tutorials from the book, together with the finished interactive effects. If you're in a real hurry, you can download the source-code FLAs for many of the tutorials, in both Flash 5 and Flash 4 versions, from the CD-ROM New Masters folder. Also on the CD-ROM are video QuickTime interviews with the designers from the book. What you'll learnNew Masters of Flash is a compendium of advanced Flash techniques aimed at working Flash designers who are looking for inspirations and radical techniques. Across the 19 chapters, you will learn deployable skills for a wide range of effects and applications, many of which take ActionScripting right out of the box. Also covered are optimizing Flash assets for use in Director, exploiting Flash 5's advanced sound manipulation toolkit and an introduction to translating geometry directly into ActionScript. This is not a beginner's book. You'll need to feel comfortable with the Flash 5 interface and know some basic scripting constructs in order to get the most from what these experts have to teach. But apart from that, a load of curiosity and a taste for pushing web-design to the max is all that's required. Who this book is for * Web artists with experience in the Flash environment * Aspiring designers looking for greater inspiration from industry leaders