Flash Animation Tutorial: Key Frames

Video Transcript

"So, what I just went through, I went through it pretty quickly, so I want to make sure everyone understands what's going on here. The first thing you have to understand, is what a Keyframe is, and if you see this black dot on your Timeline, that is a Keyframe, so the first Keyframe, and I'm just going to turn off the square, so we're just working with the circle, and that's interesting for you to note, is that there's an eye symbol here, which basically means show or hide, and then there's a lock symbol here, which means lock or unlock. Anyway, just looking at the circle. In fact, I'm going to delete the square, so you delete an entire layer, by hitting on the Trash Can here, so we've got the circle that starts out top right, and then as it goes along, it travels bottom left. The only thing that we did to create that animation, is decide where the object starts, and where it finishes, so you see, there it just updated, because I moved the start point. Now, if I want to move the end point, I just have to move it to the second Keyframe, and move it over here, so you can see now, it's doing this. Now, what if I wanted to put a Keyframe in the middle? Well, I'll select the Keyframe I want to create a new Keyframe on. I'll hit F6, or you can go to Modify Timeline, Convert to Keyframe, or you would just hit the F6, so right now, even though there's a Keyframe there, it's not doing anything, because in the position that it would have normally been on frame five. It's just saying, okay, make a Keyframe on that frame, but the animation hasn't changed, because it was on that frame in the middle of this transition anyway, so what we want to do, is we want to move that, so now this is what we've got. See, every time we make a Keyframe, and we move that object on that Keyframe. Now, if I move the object here, it's automatically going to create a new Keyframe for me. You see that?"