Flash

The Flash timeline is the digital equivalent of a flip book, with each frame representing a slice of time and successive cels (frames) displayed over time to create the illusion of motion. Like traditional cel animation, Flash supports the ...

One of Flash designers' worst habits is increasing the frame rate to absurdly high values to make animations appear smoother. Although this may work in a simple FLA performing a lone animation, when you are building a larger Flash movie or si...

You can change the rate of both scripted and unscripted time-based motion in several ways. To change the speed of an animation, you can tween it out over more (or fewer) frames or change the frame rate. You can insert additional frames in the...

Flash animation is all about doing the minimum to get across the story, because both bandwidth and Flash performance are at a premium. One trick used to minimize work and bandwidth requirements is the walk cycle. By creating a repeating anima...

Flash is the number one motion graphics and multimedia delivery platform for the Web, but it is not the only one available. Putting aside the mainstream applications, such as Toonboom (http://www.toonboom.com) and Macromedia Director (http://...

Tweens are the animation method of choice for the non-code-savvy animator, but they suffer from a number of limitations. The most obvious is that they are less conducive to interactivity than scripted motion. That's fine for many applications...

This effect consists of lots of randomly falling, reversed Katakana characters (see http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa052103a.htm for details on Katakana). The first symbol, named text, is a simple three-keyframe timeline, as sh...

Early users of the technique such as Manuel Clement (http://www.mano1.com) did the whole thing by hand, but the introduction of a number of dedicated 3D-to-Flash exporters and standalone applications (most notably Swift 3D, http://www.swi...

Flash doesn't have native support for particle effects, and animating thousands of tiny movie clips in different directions is time consuming. But it is easier than you may think to create varied effects. The simplest particle is one that ...

" One of the easiest (and most used) applications of shape tweening is morphing text. To create such a shape tween, use the Text tool to type a letter, such as "e" in frame 1. Insert a keyframe (F6) in frame 10 and, in frame 10, delete t...