Animation the Old-Fashioned Way

• Aug 8, 2002
• Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Sams

This chapter is from the book
Sams Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash MX in 24 Hours

Introduction: Frame-by-Frame Animation

It's finally time to animate! You've assembled the graphics that will be animated, and last hour you learned the basic components of an animation (frames, keyframes, framerate, and tweening). Now you're ready to create your own animation.

Instead of starting with the two ways Flash can tween for you (motion tween and shape tween), we're going to begin by animating each step in the animation frame by frame. We'll get to shape and motion tweening in the next two hours (Hours 8, "Using Motion Tween to Animate," and 9, "Using Shape Tween to Morph"), but for now, we're going to animate the old-fashioned way, frame-by-frame.

This hour you will

• Learn how to make a frame-by-frame animation

• Learn to use the Onion Skin tools for assistance

• See some tricks that can make you more efficient with this otherwise cumbersome technique