Need Some Guidance.

My Friend recently tasked me to design a Band site for him. Its not my first experience with Flash, but I am still kind of newbie.

The site I wish to replicate is sort of like this.

http://www.aliazmat.com/

I don't want to replicate it wholly. I want to make a good navigatable version with buttons and all. Although I am familar with doing buttons, but my skill is limited, so here's the things I need to ask.

How can that effects on the guy's face be created?
How do you actually load things from an outside source while the Loading bar progresses?
Finally should I create different scenes for each page? Or 1 big Movie?

Someone Told me to do this.

I really don't know the XML part, anybody has any tutorials for that.?

 

The answers you got are on thr right way. The way I see it you can:

1. Make two layers in Flash; one with the image with the patterns already added, and another with only the patterns. Next you just need to do a tween of each pattern, modifying its Color either by a simple Alpha or Advanced (you can search for "flash burn effect" to get more ideas). Also there's a highlight running vertically that pretty much is the same effect.

2. Depending on the size and quantity of elements, you may need XML or not. To get you started, I believe you will find a lot of answers about preloader here:
www.senocular.com/flash/tutorials/preloading For XML tutorials, look at www.kirupa.com

3. Yes, definitely avoid scenes. That's one fo those things that you wonder why Adobe kept on CS3.

 

w3schools.com has an XML tutorial.