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Motion Tweening
Welcome once again to Foundation Flash tutorials. This is about one of the most important things that you will ever learn to do in Flash, Motion Tweening. It is really relatively simple, but still very important. What we will be making is something a bit like this:
Now then. I mentioned in one of my previous tutorials that you do not have to animate your movies frame by frame, and that there is a way round that. That is called motion tweening. In normal animation studios, you might get somebody who comes in and draws "Key Frames". i.e. Key parts of the animation. And then a less important animator who comes in and draws everything between the key frames so that it looks like they are moving. Flash plays the part of that less important animator.
First you need to draw in where your circle will begin. Draw a circle on the left hand side of the stage, using the oval tool. Ten you have to convert it to a symbol. Do this by pressing F8. A box will pop up. Select graphical symbol and name it circle. I will explain symbols briefly now.
Symbols are stored in your library in case you ant to use it again. It is helpful to name them. You must convert things to a symbol when motion tweening because it only works like that. I think Flash does actually group them so that it does work. But it is best to keep organised. There are three types of symbol. Movie Clip, Graphical and Button. Movie Clips are literally movie clips. They store something moving. But everything stored inside that Movie Clip can be collectively moved around on the stage. Graphical symbols only store Graphics, and Buttons, I will go into in a future tutorial.
Then you must create another key frame, to tell Flash where you want the circle to end up. Go to the timeline and click on about frame 30. Then when it is selected, press F6. F6 is the shortcut for creating a new key frame. You will see your circle, now in frame 30, on the stage. Move it, in frame 30, to the right hand side of the stage. Now you have your two key frames. Right click between your first and second key frame. Select "Create motion tween". Now press ctrl and enter ( or command + Enter if you are using a mac) to test your movie. A Flash player will launch showing you your finished movie.
I hope this has helped you, and thank you for reading this,
Leon.
