Starting

One of the main characteristics of Flash 8 is its simplicity, the straightforwardness in its use allows to create animations in a effective and quick way.

Let's suppose you want to create an animation in which a globe goes up and down. It may seem a job for long hours, but it is not as bad. Let's see how easy is to handle it with Flash.

Making the Animation

In this chapter we do not try to teach you how you can realize a Flash animation (you will see it later), the objective is to understand how Flash creates animations and how it makes our work easier.

At first glance, it seems logical to draw the globe at each moment, so that growing number of moments makes the movement more real: the more drawn instants, the more realistic movement. Nevertheless, with Flash it is sufficient to create only 3 frames: firstly we will draw the globe at the initial instance (above all), secondly, we willl draw the globe at the moment when it touches the ground and then the globe will come back to its inicial position (actually you can create this frame by making a copy of the first one). So far as we see now, most part of the work (drawing objects) is already done.

Now, the duration of each movement is determined by setting the time between the moments when the globe is at the top and at the bottom, and finally Flash is pointed out to create an animation of movement between those two frames. It is easy, isn't it?

Observe how it looks like now: