Adobe Flash Professional

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional can create two types of tweened animation: motion tweens and shape tweens. Flash can also create Classic Tweens, and you can read in this section why they’re not covered in this learning guide.

Motion tweens are a very common way to create movement with Flash, because Flash does most of the work, making things easy for you. Also, motion tweens can help minimize file size, particularly over frame-by-frame animation, since you have fewer assets in your documents.

With motion tweening you create the motion tween and then define properties such as position, size, and rotation for an instance or text block at one point in time, and then you change those properties at another point in time. When you do this, Flash automatically creates the gradual change between the first and second point in time. You can also apply a motion tween that follows a motion path.

In shape tweening, you draw a shape at one point in time, and then you change that shape or draw another shape at another point in time. Flash interpolates the values or shapes for the frames in between, thus creating the animation. The shape morphs from the first shape into the second shape, or you can animate color and gradients.

What you can tween

You can motion-tween many properties of symbol instances and text fields. Flash can tween the position, size, rotation, and skew of instances and text. You can also tween color effects and filters, such as the alpha transparency and blur applied to instances. Most individual properties can be tweened independently from each other. For example, you can tween the tint color independently from the tint amount. Oh, the power you now hold!

For more information on creating symbols, see the Create symbols section of the Flash product documentation. For information on applying color effects and filters to symbol instances, see the Applying filters section in the Flash product documentation.

Creating a motion tween

To animate the changes of a target object’s properties, you use motion tweens (see Figure 19). Motion tweens automatically convert changes you make to properties over time into smooth animations.

You can create a motion tween using one of three methods:

• Create a graphic or instance that you want to tween, and then right-click a frame(s) in which it’s present and select Create Motion Tween
• Select the graphic or instance that you want to tween, and select Insert > Motion Tween from the main menu
• Create a graphic or instance that you want to tween, and then right-click the instance on the Stage and select Create Motion Tween

In all of these cases, Flash converts the static frames to a tween span on the Timeline. You may encounter the following during the process:

• If the instance you have selected is not tweenable (for example, it is a raw shape instead of a symbol), you will be prompted to convert it to a symbol first. Click OK to continue creating the motion tween, and Flash creates a movie clip in this case.
• It is a good process to convert your selections into a tweenable instance, such as a movie clip or graphic symbol (if you’re using text, you’re good to go already), before you create the motion tween. This lets you control the attributes of the instance you create, meaning that it’s the most appropriate symbol type and has a recognizable name in the Library.
• If you have multiple selected items on the same layer, Flash prompts you to convert them into a single symbol.
• You cannot have ActionScript on or within a tween, meaning code cannot be placed on the frame or on an object if you’re using ActionScript 2.
• You cannot drag a motion tween to a layer that does not support tweens, such as a layer with a classic tween or an IK layer. If you create a motion tween on a layer with a classic tween, it moves to a new tween layer. You cannot create a motion tween on a layer with an IK span.