Who Framed the Animation?
The secret of animation in Flash, as in the movies, is that nothing ever really moves. A Flash movie creates the illusion of movement by quickly displaying a sequence of still images. Each still image is slightly different. Your brain fills in the gaps to give you the impression of movement.
One of the great things about Flash is that you can easily create complicated, spectacular extravaganzas of animation. And Flash stores lots of information in the super-compact vector format. Because the files can be small, they can be transmitted over the Web quickly. That's good for your Web site viewers.
Just as in a movie on film, each still image is contained in a frame. Each frame represents a unit of time. You create the animation by placing images in the frames. A frame can contain one object or none or many, depending on how crowded a scene you want to create.
Time is your ally in Flash because you have complete control over it. You can look at each individual image in time and tweak it to your heart's content. Then you can step on the gas, play everything back at full speed, and watch everything appear to move.
In Flash, you create animation in three ways:
- Frame by frame: You move or modify objects one frame at a time. This frame-by-frame animation is time consuming but is sometimes the only way to create complex animated effects. This method can certainly satisfy your appetite for total control.
- Tweening: You create starting frames and ending frames and let Flash figure out where everything goes in the in-between frames, which is why it's called tweening. Tweening is much more fun and easier than frameby-frame animation. If you can create the animation you want by tweening, it's definitely the way to go. Flash offers two types of tweening:
- motion tweening and shape tweening, both of which we describe later in this chapter, in the section "The Animation Tween."
- Timeline effects: You choose from a list of prebuilt animations, adjust a few settings, and then instantly apply them to your text, graphics, buttons, or movie clips. Flash automatically creates the tweens for you. This cool feature of Flash takes the automatic creation of animation to a whole new level.
In tweening, the starting and ending frames are called keyframes because they are the key moments in time that the software uses to calculate the inbetween frames. Tweening not only means less work for you but also creates smaller files (which download faster) because you're describing your animations more concisely. In frame-by-frame animation, every frame is a keyframe because every frame defines a change in the action. (Information from "Flash CS3 for Dummied" ebook)
Let's start!
1. Open Flash and create a new Flash File (ActionScript 3.0)
2. Select Text Tool and type the first letter from your text.
To understand more about Text I put some settings on my text. Font _sans and bold! Look in the next image where to change this!
My text will be PITICSTYLE saw the first letter is P
3. To create this example we work only on a layer. Now click on the frame 5 -> right click and select insert keyframe
4. Now I type the next letter from frame 5 to frame 10 (here insert keyframe)
5. Do this step for every letter from your text! If you have 5 letter you need to have 25 frames!
6. Before to save you can test your result! Go to Control and select Play or Control and Test Movie
If you select Test Movie a pop-up window will open
7. Now if everything is ok you need to save your result. Do to this go to File and select Publish. Now if you go in the location where you save the project you will see 3 files:
- filename.swf
- AC_RunActiveContent
- filename.html
Open filename.html and you will see the result in your browser. That's it, this is the final result!
Reply