WordPress tools under a completely custom website

Hello,

I’ve had a completely custom website designed in HTML by a friend / musical colleague for a local music service I’m heading here in Boston. The designer has a programmer friend who was going to handle the technicalities, but the programmer ultimately needed to charge more than expected for the coding of certain sections of the website – a news section and some biography / information pages.

I’m a total newbie when it comes to web design language, and the web designer I’m working with is busy with other projects and has never worked with WordPress before. I’ve done lots of scouring of the WordPress documents regarding custom themes and templates, and I’ve sent him the pages and external pages / videos I felt relevant. They’re not exactly bite-sized, though, and I’m trying to cut down on his time investment. I was hoping the community here might have some pointers to websites or some straight-up information…

What we’d like to do is take his design and slap it over WordPress tools so that I can easily update the website myself but keep his template and design, which I love and are specific to the aesthetic of the project.

SO: Is it possible to start with a blank slate, aesthetically, and effectively copy+paste his HTML in, for a completely custom website built on top of WordPress functionality? Or does one need to find the closest template / theme and modify from there? Or does one need to develop a custom theme or template from scratch, within certain language boundaries or in some way beholden to WordPress?

Then, one page of the website will be one big Flash player that is linked to certain Member features. Is it possible to then have pages and coding outside the WordPress skeleton? Or, is it possible to code a Flash app and fairly advanced Authenticated User functions into a WordPress site?

I’ll keep on my hunt and communication with my web designer, but any information or useful links the community might have would be hugely appreciated! Thanks so much for your time and in advance for any help. Take care,

Cullen