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The task of producing animation by
hand is none too simple. To automate this process and make your work
more productive Macromedia Flash provides tools that will be briefly
introduced here. It might take some time to get accustomed to these
concepts, but this will pay as soon as we get to customizing the .FLA
file. You will also need it opened now to do some practice. The
tools that you'll need are layers, keyframes, and symbols.
Layers are common to many
graphical programs. You can think of them as of thin transparent
films with text and images placed on them. You can change the order
in which the films are stacked, edit their contents independently,
and lots of other things.
What we will need most for now is modifying the appearance of layer
contents (not the contents themselves). In Flash you can make
contents of a layer invisible or display just contours. Try
out both by following the steps below:
1. Open the .FLA file and adjust
the view by selecting View>Magnification>Show All.
2. Make sure the Timeline is
visible. If not, use View>Timeline to display it. (You can
locate Timeline by turning it on and off with menu or upon
consulting Help>Lessons>01 Introduction, which explains names
and purposes of main interface windows).
3. Locate an eye icon in the top
of layers list from the left side of timeline. Click on dots in the
column beneath it. When a dot changes to a red cross it means that
the corresponding layer was made invisible. Try to locate which
elements that you see in the scene belong to which layers.
4. Locate a square icon, which is
to the right of the eye icon. Click on squares beneath to display
layers in contours. Solid square denotes normal display mode for
this layer. In contour mode you are able to see objects with
transparency turned on. This way you can identify more elements in
the scene including those for which invisibility of a layer does not
make any difference.
Keyframes
There is another reason besides
convenience for having layers in Flash. That is what is called
tweening. The idea is simple: you specify properties of a
shape in starting and ending frames, and Flash generates everything
that is in beTWEEN. For such generation to be possible there
can be just one animated shape per layer during each moment of time.
To make many things happen simultaneously you need several layers.
Each layer can have many frames with several of them containing
shapes that the designer specified by hand - these are
keyframes. You can tell keyframes by a dot they have.
Ordinary frames are just white and gray squares to the right of
layer name in Timeline. Tweening displays as an arrow between
keyframes. Fill color varies depending on the type of shape
properties changed. You will see violet-filled tweened frames
most often. Violet means change of coordinate in time, in other
words motion. Try selecting keyframes with a click. Note that
a click on a tweened frame selects the entire range of frames for
which tweening occurs - this is NOT what you want to do. When
selecting keyframes notice that animated elements of that layer get
selected. hese are symbols. In fact, you customize your intro
template by editing them.
Symbols are building blocks of
your Flash movie. They can be static graphics or text and they can
be animation themselves. The most valuable property of these objects
is that there is one and only "master copy" of symbol per movie.
When you edit a symbol in one location all its occurrences change as
well. You can view a complete list of movie symbols in the Library. Display the Library window by selecting Window>Library. You
can start editing symbol names by double-clicking on text or you can
go into symbol editing mode by double-clicking the icons from the
left. When finished, select Edit>Movie to return to image
editing mode.
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