Director Tutorial

The Movie - "A Day at the Beach"

 
"A Day at the Beach" - 
The Full-length Movie

The movie at the right was created to help write this tutorial on how to create movies in the Director software. 

If the movie does not start automatically on your computer, you may need to visit the Macromedia website and download the free Shockwave player at
http://sdc.shockwave.com/shockwave/download/ frameset.fhtml?application/x-director
 
 
 
 

 


 
 
"A Day at the Beach--Part I"

To get the above movie, two different movie segments were created and joined together with a Lingo script.  In the last frame of the score to Part I (the segment to the right), the following Lingo script was added to link this Part 1 to Part 2 of the movie:

on exitFrame
  go frame 1 of movie("Beach_Movie_Part_2.dcr")
end


 
 
"A Day at the Beach--Part II"

The movie to the right is the second segment of the beach movie.  This segment was joined to Part I with the Lingo script.  There is another Lingo script at the end of the last scene that causes the end of this movie segment to loop continuously, based on a place marker at the beginning of the loop section:

on exitFrame me
  go loop
end exitFrame


 
 
Codes & Lingo Scripts

The two movie segments, Beach_Movie_Part_1.dir and Beach_Movie_Part_2.dir, were first saved as Director .dir files with the Lingo scripts added.  Then, the first movie file was saved in Shockwave format as Beach_Movie_Parts_1_and_2.dcr.  During this process, the second movie was linked as a shockwave file also, using the .dcr extension in the script.  Director creates a test webpage of the newly-created shockwave file.  The script to the right appears in that test webpage.  The script is a long one and it should be copied and pasted into your webpage where the movie will appear.

<object id=Beach_Movie_Parts_1_and_2 
 codeBase=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/director/sw.cab#version=8,0,0,0 
      classid=clsid:166B1BCA-3F9C-11CF-8075-444553540000 width=320 height=240><param NAME="src" VALUE="Beach_Movie_Parts_1_and_2.dcr"><param NAME="swRemote" VALUE="swSaveEnabled='true' swVolume='true' swRestart='true' swPausePlay='true' swFastForward='true' swContextMenu='true' "><param NAME="swStretchStyle" VALUE="none"><param NAME="bgCTolor" VALUE="#FFFFFF"><embed src="Beach_Movie_Parts_1_and_2.dcr" bgColor=#FFFFFF  width=320 height=240 
      swRemote="swSaveEnabled='true' swVolume='true' swRestart='true' 
      swPausePlay='true' swFastForward='true' swContextMenu='true' " 
      swStretchStyle=none type="application/x-director" 
      pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/"></embed></object>
Converting to Shockwave Format for Web Publishing

Before the two .dir movie files could be converted to Shockwave files, we went to the  Director menu bar and selected "Insert" > "Control" > "Shockwave Active X Control."
Then, to convert the files to Shockwave, we selected "Xtras" from the menu bar,
chose "Update Movies," and clicked the radio button next to 
"Convert to Shockwave."  This process saved the movie segments into
one joined .dcr file format that is compatible with webpages.