Creating Your First Animated Movie with Flash CS3 - Creating the Bouncing Ball Program
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There are a few ways to animate in Flash. The easiest is using the Tween method. Back before computer animation (in fact, this practice is still used today), artists in American studios would draw the beginning of an action and its end, and send it to a country such as South Korea to draw the in between frames. For instance, if a cartoon character was waving his hand, the American artists would draw the first frame of the character with his hand at the left-most point, and the end frame with his hand at the right-most point. They would then ship the artwork to South Korea, where a roomful of artists would fill in the spaces in between This would save the studios a lot of money, as the foreign animators charged much less.
Flash uses a similar method (sans the Korean artists). You simply tell Flash where your object begins and ends, and Flash does all the rest.
Starting Over
Clear all the objects off your stage (the easiest method is to double-click the Eraser Tool) and create a new object. Make this one a ball, as rectangles don't bounce very well. Go ahead and group it, add whatever colors you like to it, and modify it into a symbol named Ball (creative, I know).
Next, drag the ball onto the stage, into the bottom left-hand corner. On your timeline, right-click on frame ten and choose Insert Keyframe. What this does is insert identical frames from the first frame up until frame number ten (imagine if you had to draw each frame instead!). While frame ten is still highlighted, move your ball diagonally and up a few spaces, as though it were bouncing into the air. Next, right-click on frame five and choose Insert Tween.
To see what Tweening does, click back on frame one and press the enter button. As you can see, the ball moves from you starting point to the ending point, and you didn't have to do a thing! To further animate the ball, click on every tenth frame and relocating the ball to a new position until you get bored. After setting your first Tween, you do not need to insert anymore; Flash does it for you automatically.
Done yet? Good. Now to preview the movie and see what your user will see, click Control>Test Movie. Congratulations, you just created your first Flash movie. To save it, click File>Save.
In the next tutorial, we will learn to make more advanced movies and how to work with dynamic text. But for now, enjoy watching the bouncing ball.
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