As an employee of an up and coming web Design Company, you have been approached by a small local cinema, called Valley Viewing who are looking to revamp their existing HTML website which is nearly a decade and a half out of date. Valley Viewing is set in a small rural town and has recently been the target of an impressive 50MByte telecoms upgrade allowing local residents to enjoy the benefits of ultra fast broadband access. The cinema was soo excited by this news that the manager, Mr. Takei insisted on a new website driven by rich media and interactivity. Valley Viewing's current website is one which is static in nature and thus requires regular manual updates to be made by its staff on a regular basis. After reviewing similar websites on the Internet, you have decided to make use of Rich Internet Technologies and to use Adobe Flash as the chosen platform to produce the new cinema website for Valley Viewing. After consultation with Mr. Takei he has agreed for you to proceed to build a prototype.
Valley Viewing has decided to start fresh with a new look and image and they have therefore allowed you free reign as to the overall look and appearance to its new RIA website. Their only stipulation is that their new website must look professional, clean, functional and easy to use for their customers but at the same time promote good use of rich media and interactivity where possible. A work colleague of yours has already identified a number of features and guidelines which should be present in the new RIA website outlined as follows:
i) A Graphical User Interface (GUI) constructed from a simple navigation system (comprising of around 5 key frames) making use of the Flash timeline and Actionscript to navigate between these individual frames. You should structure and populate the key frames of your RIA to make use of any necessary components, text and graphics to provide a working front end to your RIA. You are allowed to take inspiration from various cinema websites but this MUST not be a direct copy. The front end must have a certain amount of originality and make use of various UI components and dynamic text;
ii) Internal functionality must make use of Actionscript to grab external data from outside of your RIA. E.g. getting information (e.g. film title, rating etc) from custom generated XML files to populate dynamic text boxes to appear within your RIA at runtime. Not all information has to be dynamic and some can be static in nature. Other uses of Actionscript may make use of code to display a photo slideshow or to show film trailers making use of a video component. For extra marks you may decide to incorporate an interactive map -making use of web services (via a contact us page) showing the location to the cinema;
iii) Media can exist in the form of text, photos, sounds and video trailers;
iv) You can use Actionscript 2.0 or 3.0 but be careful on mixing versions of code;
v) The web site must be created in a version of Adobe Flash (not Dreaweaver or equivalent);
vi) Typical canvas size must be set to 1024 pixels width and a maximum of 850 pixels height;
vii) The RIA should comply with website accessibility guidelines;
viii) Information to include within your RIA may consist of (but not limited to):