View Your Cast Members - MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX 2004-GETTING STARTED WITH DIRECTOR Getting Started

View your cast members

To create a Director movie, you need cast members. Cast members are the objects that appear on
the Stage and in the Score. Some of these elements might be text, graphics, sound, video, or
scripting behaviors.
The movie you create in this tutorial consists of three scenes. Some cast members appear in more
than one scene, and some appear in one scene only. First, use the Cast window to view your
current set of media. Next, you will begin adding new cast members. You add cast members to a
Director movie by creating them in Director or by importing files made in other applications.
If the Cast window is not already open, select Window > Cast.
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You can view the Cast window in two views: List and Thumbnail. In List view, you can sort
cast members by name, number, date modified, type, and other criteria. Thumbnail view lets
you see a thumbnail image of each cast member. In Thumbnail view, cast members are always
shown in numerical order. For this tutorial, you will use the Thumbnail view. If your Cast
window is in List view, you need to switch to Thumbnail view.
To toggle from List view to Thumbnail view, click the Cast View Style button in the upper left
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corner of the Cast window.
The Cast window contains cast members that you can use in your movie. The first is a text cast
member. It contains the text "Trio Motor Company." The text cast member thumbnail image that
appears in the Cast window contains a small A icon in the lower right corner. This is the cast
member type icon, and the A indicates that it is a text cast member.
The second cast member is a button. Button cast members have special functionality built into
them, such as changing color when clicked, so that they behave in the way most users expect
buttons to behave. This button contains the text "Go to Animation." Its cast member type icon is
a small square button shape.
The third cast slot is empty. You will add a cast member to that slot later. The fourth cast member
is a bitmap image. Its cast member type icon is a paintbrush.
The ninth, tenth, and eleventh cast slots contain bitmaps that you will use as custom buttons.
Using a bitmap image lets you control the appearance of the button, but it does not provide the
built-in functions of the Director button cast member type. However, you can add these
functions with script, using either the Director scripting language called Lingo or JavaScript
syntax. In this tutorial, you will use Lingo to add these functions.
44 Chapter 4: Building Your First Basic Movie
Cast View Style button