Flash animation overview

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Overview

Motion tweening means motion animation with interpolation.

Learning goals

Learn about the various methods to create motion animations in Flash

Prerequisites

Flash CS3 desktop tutorial or Flash CS4 desktop tutorial

Flash layers tutorial (first part)

Flash drawing tutorial (at least some of it)

Flash frame-by-frame animation tutorial (not absolutely needed, but probably useful)

Immediate next steps

Flash classic motion tweening tutorial (CS3-style tweening for CS3 and better)

Flash CS4 motion tweening tutorial (CS4, CS5)

AS3 TweenLite tweening engine (CS3-CS5, intermediate)

Moving on

Flash shape tweening tutorial

Flash animation summary

After that you should be ready for interactivity. E.g. do the Flash button tutorial

Quality and level

This is just an overview article.

Introduction

Frame-by-frame vs. tweening

In Flash CS3 to CS5, you can create several kinds of animations and associated special effects. To create motion animation, there are 2 options:

• Frame-by-frame animation (ancient technique used for cartoons). This leads to precise results but is time consuming. Actually, before doing this tutorial you can do Flash frame-by-frame animation tutorial first.
• Tweening. Wikipedia, retrieved 20:45, 7 August 2007 (MEST) defines “Tweening, short for in-betweening, as the process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that the first image evolves smoothly into the second image. Inbetweens are the drawings between the keyframes which help to create the illusion of motion. Tweening is a key process in all types of animation, including computer animation. Sophisticated animation software enables one to identify specific objects in an image and define how they should move and change during the tweening process. Software may be used to manually render or adjust transitional frames by hand or use to automatically render transitional frames using interpolation of graphic parameters.”. In other contexts, one uses also "morphing". E.g. PCMag (retrieved 20:45, 7 August 2007 (MEST)) defines tweening as “An animation technique that, based on starting and ending shapes, creates the necessary "in-between" frames. See morphing”.

What can be animated with motion tweening ?

In Flash 9, you can animate all sorts of compound objects:

• Symbols, i.e. any object that is an instance of a library object, e.g.
  • Graphic symbols
  • Movies (full *.swf Flash animations or embedded movie clips)
  • Buttons
• Compound objects (things that you grouped together)
• Text boxes