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Principles of Flash Animation

Flash is an environment, which is used mostly for animation. When you create a Flash file (it’s called movie) you populate it with different objects, which can be easily animated.

Most of HTML page, even those that called “dynamic” are static, if compare to Flash. Sometimes HTML objects are moving when events are rising, and rarely are animated, but even though their time-dependent behavior is primitive and difficult to manage.

The most important feature of Flash environment is a Timeline and most distinguished technique is Tweening.

Let’s talk about it.

Flash file (movie) appears as a set of objects – texts and images, but if compare to traditional HTML page appearance it has one more dimension – a “lifespan” . It means that Flash movie depending on designer may live 1/12 of the second or 1 second, or 3 minutes and so on. Therefore every Flash movie has a start and finish. In the design process it is reflected on the “Timeline”. Moving along the Timeline we may see how file looks like in this relative moment of time (for example 5 seconds after start).

So, the Flash movie consists of the set of Frames. When Flash movie runs frames changes fast enough to imitate flawless movement. It is the same idea that uses in the cartoons – Flash frames serve as cartoon drawings on the film.

But if it were the only animated feature of the Flash designers would be requested to draw all individual frames for the animation. And here is the point where Flash is precious. Flash engine allows to calculate instantly how image changes between frames. So if you want to move a ball from the left side of the screen to the right side – you need to place the ball in the left corner and then – several frames later on the timeline – place it into the right corner. Flash will draw all intermediate frames for you. This process is referred as Tweening and you will learn how to apply it during several lessons of our course.

Look at the example. It illustrates the work which is done by Flash to save your time with the animation process.

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