How to Make a Falling Ball in Flash Cs5

Create a falling ball in Flash.

In Flash, a leading animation program, you can create a falling ball animation -- a graphic that moves from the top of the stage to the bottom --with a tween. A tween is a Flash animation feature that automatically fills in the frames of an animation. All you have to do is create the start and end frames. All you need to get started is the ball graphic, which you can create in Adobe Illustrator or draw with Flash's drawing tools.

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Flash Professional CS3 or later

Instructions

1. Open the Flash movie containing the ball you want to animate, or create a new Flash movie by clicking the "File" menu and choosing "New." This opens the New Document dialog box. Choose "ActionScript 3.0" from the Type list and click "OK."

2. Create a ball at the top stage. You can draw the ball with Flash's Oval Tool or import a graphic.

3. Right-click frame 50 in the Timeline panel and choose "Insert Keyframe." This keyframe ends the animation. To make the animation shorter, insert the keyframe earlier in the timeline, such as frame 30. To make the animation longer so that the ball moves more slowly, place a keyframe in a later frame, such as frame 100.

4. Drag the ball to the location on the stage where you want the animation to end. For example, if you want the ball to fall straight down, drag it horizontally in a straight line to the bottom of the stage. If you want the ball to fall at an angle, drag it diagonally from its current position.

5. Right-click any frame between frames two and 49, and then choose "Create Classic Tween." To see the falling ball animation, click in frame 1, and then drag the Playhead to frame 50. The Playhead is the small red square indicating the current frame at the top of the timeline.

References

• Adobe: About Classic Tween Animation
• Entheos: Timeline Motion Tween in Flash
• Smart Webby: Flash Animation Basics

Resources

• Adobe: Animation Basics