Flash Animation Tweening 1
Stephen Lewis
Trinity School
In this lesson you make Flash timeline animations.
Start a new flash drawing, making sure you have the timeline, tools, properties and main drawing windows visible
Click just under the number 25 in the timeline, and you should get a blue rectangle
Go to the top menu, choose Insert/Keyframe, and the blue rectangle should go black
Repeat these two steps at number 50 and number 75 on the timeline (you can do more if you want by scrolling the timeline)
Click on frame 1 in the timeline and draw something
Click on frame 25 in the timeline and draw something
Click on frame 50 in the timeline and draw something
Click on frame 75 in the timeline and draw something
Now go back and click anywhere in the rectangle under frames 1 to 25 then go to the Properties window and in the Tween menu choose Shape. You should see a solid arrow appear in the rectangle under frames 1 to 25
Do the same thing for the rectangles under frames 25 to 50 and under frames 50 to 75
At any time you can click in the keyframes 1, 25, 50 or 75 and change the drawing you made for that frame. This will change your animation. You can only change drawings in the keyframes you made.
One more thing: If you want your animation to loop nicely, you must make the last keyframe exactly the same as the first. Here’s how: Go to the first frame select the drawing with the arrow tool (it might already be selected) and copy it using the top menu Edit/Copy. Now go to the last keyframe (frame 75). Erase any drawing you have there already. Now from the top menu choose Edit/Paste In Place. Do NOT use Paste. This should put the drawing from frame 1 in exactly the same location in frame 75, which will create a perfect loop with no jumps.
Now that you know how to do that, you can build it up to 250 frames. When you have an interesting morph or animated story , save then publish your work with your Trinity user name plus "Animation 1" and email the .swf to me.