Types Of Animation.

Abideen Gill

A motion tween is an animation that is created by specifying different values for an object property in different frames. Flash pro calculates the values for the property in between those two frames. The term tween comes from words ‘in between’

For example, you can place a symbol left of the Stage in frame 1, and move it to the right of the Stage in frame 20. When you create a tween, Flash Pro calculates all the positions of the movie clip in between. The result is an animation of the symbol moving from left to right, from frame 1 to frame 20. In each frame in between, Flash Pro moves the movie clip one 20th of the distance across the Stage.Tweening is used to show objects moving across the screen to make it look like a mini clip or moving picture.

My birthday Card

Motion Tween

Morphing is when you turn an object shape over a period of time. Morphing is the process of transforming two images where it seems like the first melts, dissolves and rearranges itself to become the second. Many people use this technique for banners or advertisements on the Internet to make it look more interesting and eye catching.

As you can see on my own animation I have chosen to morph the smoke coming out of the chimney, this give it more of a realistic affect to the train moving across the rails.

Morphing

My birthday Card

My birthday Card

Masking

For spotlight effects and transitions, use a mask layer to create a hole through which underlying layers are visible. A mask item can be a filled shape, a type object, an instance of a graphic symbol, or a movie clip. Group multiple layers under a single mask layer to create sophisticated effects.To create dynamic effects, animate a mask layer. For a filled shape used as a mask, use shape tweening; for a type object, graphic instance, or movie clip, use motion tweening. When using a movie clip instance as a mask, animate the mask along a motion path.

Masking is revealing portion of your picture or graphic in the layer below. While surfing through the net you might have come across lots of flash effects such as sky backgrounds with wording or glitter boarding, and wondered how it is being done. The answer for all this is masking. Most masks involves something being revealed behind another layer or object; for example my birthday animation

Adobe Flash Professional documents divide lengths of time into frames. In the Timeline, you work with these frames to organize and control the content of your document

A keyframe is a frame where a new symbol instance appears in the Timeline. A keyframe can also be a frame that includes Action Script code to control some aspect of your document

To insert a new frame, select Insert > Timeline > Frame (F5). To create a new keyframe, select Insert > Timeline > Keyframe (F6), or right-click To create a new blank keyframe, select Insert > Timeline > Blank Keyframe, or right click the frame where you want to place the keyframe

You can label frames in the Timeline as a way of helping organize its contents. You can also label a frame in order to be able to refer to that frame in Action Script by it’s label.

That way, if you rearrange the Timeline and move the label to a different frame number, the Action Script will still refer to the frame label and will not have to be updated.

. You can also add a blank keyframe to the Timeline as a placeholder for symbols you plan to add later or to explicitly leave the frame blank.

You place frames in the Timeline in the order you want the objects in the frames to appear in your finished content.

Frames

Layers

Layers help you organize the artwork in your Adobe Flash Professional document. You can draw and edit objects on one layer without affecting objects on another layer. In areas of the Stage with nothing on a layer, you can see through it to the layers below

To draw, paint, or otherwise modify a layer or folder, select the layer in the Timeline to make it active. A pencil icon next to a layer or folder name in the Timeline indicates that the layer or folder is active. Only one layer can be active at a time—although more than one layer can be selected at a time.

When you create a Flash document, it contains only one layer. To organize the artwork, animation, and other elements in your document, add more layers. You can also hide, lock, or rearrange layers. The number of layers you can create is limited only by your computer's memory, and layers do not increase the file size of your published SWF file. Only the objects you place into layers add to the project's file size.

There are four types of layers you can use in Flash:

• Normal layers contain most of the artwork in a FLA file• Mask layers contain objects used as masks to hide selected

portions of layers below them• Masked layers are layers beneath a mask layer that you

associate with the mask layer• Guide layers contain

strokes that can be used to guide the arrangement of objects on other layers or the motion of classic tween animations on other layers.

Controls.

The tools in the Tools panel let you draw, paint, select, and modify artwork, as well as change the view of the Stage. The Tools panel is divided into four sections.

The tools area contains drawing, painting, and selection tools

The view area contains tools for zooming and panning in the application window

The colours area contains modifiers for stroke and fill colours.

The options area contains modifiers for the currently selected tool. Modifiers affect the tool’s painting or editing operations.

Toolbar contains all the tools you will need for creating and editing artwork.

Selection Tools-Used to select an object or to resize the object on the stage while in the free transform mode

Lasso Tools-is a free selection tool that lets you draw your own selection outlines instead of clicking by shape or using the default dragged-square selection outline created by the Pointer tools. With the Lasso Tool you can click and then drag to draw any shape selection that you want

•Eyedropper Tools-To choose color from the designated pointer, whether be it on stage or inside a color

•Brush Tools-widely used to paint a desired part of an object or shape with the desired color and different shape of brush.

•Hand Tools-This particular tools used mainly to drag stage while zooming in a large scale

Button.

Buttons are symbols that contain four frames. Each frame of a button symbol represents a different state for the button: Up, Over, Down, and Hit. These states determine how a button visually behaves when the mouse is rolled over it or when the user clicks the button. This document explains how to create basic and advanced buttons.

At each frame in this button has a different colour. This allows the button the change colour when the mouse is hovering over the button or by clicking the button.

Green is the original colour

The colour of the rectangular shape blue once the mouse is hovering over it

The shape then turn red once the button is clicked

Pre-loader.

Preloading is a term that describes the ability to track the loading of external content into Adobe Flash Player. A pre-loader typically displays a numeric or visual indicator of the percentage of content currently loaded. Preloading serves two purposes by delivering a better user experience (providing feedback) and ensuring that the functionality works as expected (content needed for user interactions is available to the application). See Pretty Loaded for some creative examples of different styles of pre-loaders.

Preloaders facilitate the loading process for SWF files, images, audio, text, and video content. It is essential to preload files with larger file sizes to prevent the project from appearing broken as it attempts to load the requested content.

The ability to preload content in Flash Player has existed for many years. Developers have devised many ingenious ways to facilitate the loading of external content (including other SWF files) to achieve optimal performance on a wide variety of devices.

ActoinScript.

Action Script are used to make Animations more versatile, scripting languages can be used, such as Action Script in Flash. These can change a simple linear animation into one with more potential and can also allow user interactivity.

You can see my action script I have used to make my animated train stop when I want it to.

Graphics.

I used this tool, the paint tool, to change my background to Blue, to make my animation have a more realistic effect.

I used this line tool to create my train track plates. This also helped me to draw a more precise line instead of using a pen or pencil tool.

I used the shape tool to create the train, the shape tool was used to create the; two rectangles, the chimney and the train wheels.

I also used the shape tool to create the sun and then used to paint bucket tool to change to colour

to yellow.

Symbols.

A symbol can include artwork that you import from another application. Any symbol that you create automatically becomes part of the library for the current document.

You can create a symbol from selected objects on the Stage, create an empty symbol and make or import the content in symbol-editing mode, and create font symbols in Flash Professional. Symbols can contain all the functionality that Flash Professional can create, including animation.

Using symbols that contain animation lets you create Flash Professional applications with a lot of movement while minimizing file size. Consider creating animation in a symbol that has a repetitive or cyclic action—the up‑and‑down motion of a bird’s wings, for example.

Create Symbol

Modify you object > Chose Convert to symbol

Libraries.

Individual items in the library are stored as symbols. What makes symbols powerful is that you can reuse them as many times as necessary. Simply drag and drop a copy (an instance) from the Library panel onto the stage anywhere in your movie. Most importantly, each instance remains linked to the original in your library. Any changes made to the original (or master) symbol automatically update any instances of the same symbol used throughout the movie.

The library in a Flash Professional document stores media assets that you create in the Flash Professional authoring environment or import to use in the document. You can create vector artwork or text directly in Flash Professional; import vector artwork, bitmaps, video, and sound; and create symbols. A symbol is a graphic, a button, a movie clip, or text that you create once and can reuse multiple times. You can also use Action Script to add media content to a document dynamically.