How to Make Animated Flying Halloween Bats in Swish Max

Swish Max is an excellent program used to create videos and animations for websites or personal greetings. When Halloween comes, you can create customized greetings that feature a key creature of that spooky holiday--the bat.

Instructions

1. Find pictures of bats to use in the project. To help you make a better and more accurate design, it may be easier to create a simple bat in MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop. Just make sure the background is a solid color, like white or black, so it;s easier to make the background transparent later.

2. Open Swish Max. Select the option “Start a New Movie.” Load the content into your project by dragging it from a folder or going to Insert>Image in the Outline window.

3. 

   Click on the “Movie” tab in the Movie window and change the background color to a Halloween-themed black or an orange. You can also use a picture of a cave or forest for the background.

4. 

   Click on a bat that has a background surrounding it. Right-click and press "Properties," then press the “Properties" button in the Movie window. Click on the “Transparency” box to empty the outside of your bat. Press "OK" when you have achieved the proper settings.

5. Position the bats at your desired starting point in the video. Copy and paste them so you can have multiple bats in the movie. Resize and shape some of them so they are of different sizes. You can easily copy and paste by clicking on a bat and pressing CRTL+C, then CRTL+V.

6. Add effects to the bats. You first want them to enter the screen. Click on a bat file towards the top of the screen, in the "Timeline" window. Then go to Add Effect> Appear Into Position and select one of the premade animations from that list. The best flying animations are “Fly in zoom and settle” or “Perfect Landing 1.” Or choose anything else that sounds appealing.

7. Drag the red Timeline bar a few frames from the animation you just set for the bat. Go to Add Effect>Disappear From Position and select an option for the bat to follow. Several animations imitate the act of flying, so play around with them to decide which one will work best.

8. 

   Repeat this process until all of the bats have "Appearing" and "Disappearing" animations. Use the Timeline to set different start and finish times for the bats, so that they do not all fly in at the same time.

9. Preview your movie by pressing the "Play" button in the top toolbar. Press the "Stop" button to halt the preview and adjust any effects as necessary.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember to keep track of the red navigation tool in the Timeline window. Whenever you choose an animation, it will begin at the spot where the navigation tool is currently located.