A flash ebook that will let the user click on the corner of the page to manually flip the pages, or allow them to just hit the play button (of course would need a stop button as well) and sit back and watch the ebook play. I want to include sounds and narration and animation on the pages.
This first ebook that I’m doing is a children’s book and is only a few pages, but I’ll be doing many many more ebooks, so I’d like to make something that I could use as sort of a template if that’s possible.
I can find lots of tutorials out there for making a page flip effect, but not giving the option to flip or just play through. I can find tutorials on making play and stop buttons, but not tying them into page flip buttons. I’m not sure if I should just make the book into a movie (same as you would any basic flash animation) and just make the button for the page flip skip ahead to the next “scene” in the movie (ie the next page). Or maybe make it where the movie plays and stops and waits on you to turn the page.
Perhaps making each page into a movie clip and making a button that moves to the next movie clip with the page flip integrated into the beginning of each clip. This wouldn’t allow it to be made into a template easily. I would have to animate the page flip with every book.
I’ll be doing ebooks of everything from children’s books, to cook books, to erotica novels… so it would need to appeal to all ages preferably.
I can find tutorials explaining the individual components, so I guess what I’m looking for is someone that knows something about flash that could help me figure out what type of structure and components I need to pull this off.
I don’t really think a PDF will work. I want to have animation on the pages, and voice narration. I mostly need to figure out a way to put it all together. I haven’t done a lot with action scripting or movie clips before, but I’ve found a few templates for the page flipping, and I haven’t really liked any of them. I want to make the book and pages for each one, obviously book covers and styles for children’s books won’t work as well for erotica books and such, so I’m redoing the book and such each time. But what I’m really trying to figure out is how piece it all together. I’ve found tutorials for creating play and stop buttons, and for creating the actual page flips. For this book it wouldn’t really matter because it’s short, but if I do longer books, I need to be able to include buttons to skip to certain pages.
What I’m thinking at the moment is that I need to basically do each page as a movie clip. Whenever you click the corner of the pages you move front or back, so that would basically load the next page movie clip. If you needed to skip to a certain page you click the page number and it loads the corresponding movie clip for that page. I’m not sure how to do the page flips in this setup though. Ideally I would actually want to flip the page I’m on and see the next page. I thought about incorporating the animation for the flip into the start of each movie clip, but if you skipped to a new certain page it wouldn’t work right. I also though about somehow incorporating into each button a movie clip of the page flipping up that the button is on. This way when you clicked the button, it would load a movie clip for the current page flipping, and then load the movie clip of the next page or the page number clicked. This just seems tedious. I would have to have 2 movie clips per page. I suppose if I just did one movie clip for a generic page flipping, just a blank page and I did the page flip kind of fast, you wouldn’t really notice that it was blank and I could have the next page button load the page flip movie clip and then load the next page. I also want to have something on the cover of the book to turn the sound/narration on or off.
All of the ebooks that I do are going to be the same size, but the actual book itself will be different. For a fantasy book I might do a leather bound book with faded brown-ish pages, for a kid’s book it might be red or blue with clean white pages.... but they’ll all be the same size. I don’t know if this would help as far as creating some form of template or not. I just mostly need some opinions on how some of you flash experts out there would suggest constructing this. I have tutorials on all the various elements I want, I just gotta figure out the best way to go about putting them together. I can do it trial and error, but I’d rather not spend a month trouble shooting and redoing it if I can help it.
