HOW TO ANIMATE AN OBJECT IN FLASH

This is a brief tutorial on how to animate, or "tween", an object in Flash.

STEP 1
The way Flash animation works is through tweens (there are other ways, but tweening is by far the easiest). To start animating, first you have to select the object that you want to animate by clicking it. If you haven't already, you need to convert that object into a symbol. This is how Flash keeps track of each object that you animate. To do this, move to the toolbar and click MODIFY and then CONVERT TO SYMBOL.

STEP 2
Name your symbol, (leave the other settings at their default), click OK, and you are ready to animate.

STEP 3
After selecting your object on the stage, go up to to the toolbar, click on INSERT and select MOTION TWEEN.

STEP 4
In the timeline there will be a certain amount of blue bar. This can be adjusted by clicking and dragging to the desired amount of time taken to complete the animation. For example, if you want an object to take one second to animate, you would drag the bar to the 24th keyframe.

STEP 5
The way tweens work is through a start and an end point. Flash fills in everything in between with a gradual animation. The start point is inside the blue rectangle on the timeline and is noted with a black dot. This is the first frame that appears to the viewer. Select the 24th frame. As an example, let's say you want the square to move to the right, get smaller, and rotate 90 degrees. In the 24th frame you would move the object to the left, scale it down (using the scale or free transform tool in the tools pallet on the right of the screen), and rotate it 90 degrees (using the rotate or free transform tool).

And this is what we end up with:

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Further reference:

Below is a link to Flash tutorial book on Amazon.com