Flash Animation Tutorial: Shape Tweening

Video Transcript

"Okay, so, so far--let's move this controller out of the way--so far I've shown you motion tween, but I haven't shown you shape tween, and there's a difference. And tween, just for your vernacular, is the shortcut for "in between", so a key frame here and a key frame here, to tween it between the two is what the computer does. So let's create a new layer. And I actually need to label this "Circle 2". So let's create this new layer, and let's create a square. Hold down the Shift key, and create a square, and I want to fill that with yellow. Group it, Apple G, or Ctrl G. Actually, you know what, undo that. Okay now, over the course of this timeline, I want this square to change into a diamond. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to the end frame here, I'm going to move this, and I'm going to hit F6 to create new--what happened there was that my entire timeline was selected. I only want this one frame to be selected. So hit F6 and then what I can do is I can adjust the shape into a diamond--kind of rough diamond but will have to do. And then, as you can see, nothing is happening until the very end where it snaps into a diamond. Well that's because I've got to turn tweening on. Remember, hold down your right mouse key and instead of creating a motion tween, we create what's called a shape tween. Okay, so, a motion tween is just when something does not change shape but it moves. While a shape tween will change the shape. See that? Now we're going across the timeline and it's changing from a square into a diamond. And in fact if we select this and move it here. Now if we use our controller, we can see what's going on. See how it moved and changed shape at the same time? And that is a shape tween."