Chapter 6 - Understanding Animation

By default, your Timeline will be one frame long and the current frame marker will be unmovable. So open a sample file in the FLA folder which is inside the Samples folder of your Flash installation. Now you can click in the numbered area of the Timeline; click in the numbered area, not the cells. "Scrubbing" is a technique where you preview the animation by click and drag the frame market. The frame number, framerate, and elapsed time show at the bottom of the timeline. Traditional movies has a framerate of 24 fps whereas television has a fps of 30.

keyframe - a frame in which you establish exactly what should appear onstage at that particular point. To insert a keyframe, click a cell in the timeline and select Insert, Keyframe (or F6). Flash copies the onstage content from the previous keyframe. Whatever you draw in a keyframe will continue to be displayed till the next keyframe.

tweening is the process of interpolating between two keyframes; Flash will do this for us

Chapter 7 - Animation the Old-Fashioned Way

Making a frame-by-frame animation - Draw a figure. Click in frame 2. Select Insert, Insert Keyframe (or press F6) which inserts a keyframe with a copy of the figure from frame 1. Make a slight change to the figure. To preview, you can

However, this won't show you exactly what your viewers will see so better to Control>Test Movie.

Frame view button is at the right hand side on the same line as the numbered frames. Preview lets you see all the frames, Preview in Context draws the preview in the correct proportion.

Onion Skin Tools

Onion skins are a tool whereby you can see other frames to judge how much change is necessary in the image from one frame to the next. Click the leftmost Onion Skin button at the bottom of the Timeline. Which frames appear depend on the position of the Start Onion Skin and End Onion Skin markers that are at the top of the Timeline. It is easier to grab and reposition these if one has selected Large from the Frame View popup that is at the right of the Timeline frame numbers.

Modify Onion Markers button at the bottom of the Timeline. There are several options: Always Show Markers, Anchor Onion (locks the markers where they are), Onion 2 (sets them two frames ahead and two frames behind), Onion 5 (sets the markers five frames ahead and five frames behind), Onion All (moves the Start Onion Skin marker to frame 1 and the End Onion Skin marker to the last frame)

Edit Multiple Frames button at the bottom of the Timeline. This allows you to edit the contents of all frames within the Start Onion Skin and End Onion Skin markets. This is invaluable if you want to move the contents of every frame in an animation. Select Onion All from the Modify Onion Markers menu, select everything on stage (Ctrl A) and move it anywhere you want.

Frame by Frame Techniques

Pauses - Insert frame (F5); implied motion (you don't have to draw every step -- e.g. someone kicking a ball, inserting flicker by inserting a blank keyframe (something with nothing in it), whereas the Insert Frame implicitly keeps what you had before because you haven't added a keyframe

Chapter 8 - Using Motion Tween to Animate

Rules for motion tween - you can't have multiple objects in your keyframes and the one object you do have must be a symbol.

To create a motion tween - Draw and object and convert it to a symbol. Click the timeline on the frame where you want the tween to end and click Insert Keyframe. Click on frame 1 and position the object where you want it; click on frame 30 and position the object where you want it. Select the first keyframe and then in the properties panel select Motion from the tween drop down list.

Tween more than position - scale, rotation, skew, brightness, tint, and alpha however tweening alpha involves lots of processing so tweening on brightness may accomplish the same effect if background is white

Making an animation finish where it starts. Create an object convert to symbol. Then click on intermediate frame and select Insert>Keyframe. Then click on last frame and select Insert>Keyframe. This ensures that all three are in the same position. Then modify the position (or other attributes of the middle frame). The key is to create all 3 keyframes before you change anything, because if you change something and then insert a new keyframe, the new keyframe will reflect the changes.

Rotation - CW (clockwise) or CCW (counter clockwise) and can specify the number of rotations. The default for Rotate is automatic, means it will tween rotation if you manually rotate a symbol; the none setting will leave a manually rotated symbol in its rotated position during the entire tween.

Ease in and ease out - Ease in means that the motion starts out slow and then speeds up at the end, whereas Ease Out means the object starts going fast and then slows down -- the values can be set in the property panel

Chapter 9 - Using Shape Tween to Morph

Shape tweens are inefficient, leading to a significant increase in file size. Rules: no groups and no symbols. Thus if you use text, you must first break it apart (Modify>Break Apart).

Techniques and tips - keep it simple, don't mix lines and fills, leave the interpolated frames alone, use a motion tween when you can (remember that motion tween can vary more than position)

Shape hints - You use shape hints to change a shape tween. You map a point in one keyframe to a point in the other keyframe. You first create the shape tween; if it doesn't do what you want, add shape hints one point at a time. To do this, View>Show Shape Hints. Select frame 1, Modify>Shape>Add Shape Hint (Ctrl Shift H). Make sure that Snap is turned on. Use the Arrow tool to move the letter a to the point you want to map. Go to the other keyframe and move the letter a to the desired point. The letter a will change color once it's been mapped. Test the results. Add additional points as necessary.

Revised: July 28, 2003. Comments to William Pegram, wpegram@erols.com