Flash Animation Tutorial: Document Settings

Series Summary

At a time when it seems like just about everyone has their own website, the on-line challenge has moved beyond basic website construction and become how to set a site apart. How can designers grab the attention of someone who happens upon their site and get them to stay awhile? The solution is video, not simply home movie clips a la YouTube, but customized movies with animation-style special effects. A few years ago, animation programs such as Flash seemed virtually unapproachable for the non-professional. But with the latest version Flash, even the casual user can create amazing animations and custom interfaces for their own website. Borrowing sophisticated techniques from major studios such as using shared backgrounds and individual frames, this program will give users insight into how your favorite cartoons were created. As a popular animation program for creating interactive websites, Adobe Flash has become an essential software program for web designers. In this free video tutorial, a professional web designer demonstrates how to use the basic animation features in this program, including key frames, tweening and the animation timeline. With the tips in this free video series, Flash users will be able to animate simple shapes with a few basic keyboard commands.

Video Transcript

"Now, if you haven't already watched the basic drawing, video tutorial that I did, series of tutorials, you want to back and create that. This is the second part of my flash training series, so animation, let's talk about it. We've all seen animation in flash on websites that we've gone to, that maybe has a splash page, or maybe an animated button ,that you roll over and something happens. Before we can do anything complex like that, we need to understand some basic, basic principles. Let's go up to modify document. First thing, frames per second. Every animation, every timeline that you have, needs to have a frame rate, and basically what this means, is every second, how many frames are we going to go through? in order to give a smooth or a rough animation look. Film is shot at twenty four frames per second. The naked eye will normally see around thirty frames per second, I believe. If you go down to like ten frames per second, you're welcome to do that, but it will look a little more choppy, and the motion won't look smooth, so we're going to start out with twenty-four frames per second, and what that means is, that here on our timeline, frame one starts at zero, and by the time we get to frame twenty four, which doesn't exist, because we haven't added it yet. One second has elapsed, so as you go along, this timeline will not measure, will not show you in time. It will show you in frames, so just know that every twenty four frames, you're hitting one second, two seconds, three seconds, so as you time out your animation, you want to make sure that you allot the amount of frames that you have, to the time that you want the animation to complete."