One of the most important things to learn in Flash is....CREATING ANIMATIONS. This is a long process which seems tedious at first, but I'm sure once you use Flash enough it's not so bad. There are numerous types of frames.
Black dots with a gray background indicate Keyframes which specify a frame in which a change in artwork takes place. Regular frames have a gray backgroun with nothing else. They indicate that no change in artwork is occurring from the last keyframe. A white rectangle with a gray background indicated the last regular frame before a change. A Blank keyframe is designated by a white rectangle with a white circle in it, which indicates there is no artwork present in it. A gray background by itself indicates a regular frame. A white background indicates a blank frame and finally a white rectangle with a white background indicates the last blank frame before the change. Whew!!! One of the most important shortcuts is F6. This is how you create a keyframe. To add a regular frame click F5. F7 gives you a blank frame.
To create an animation all you need to do is select the last frame you want the animation on --> select F5 to create a keyframe on that frame, which will designate the end of the animation --> then go back in between the first and last frame and create keyframes. At those frames you will want to move your objects in order to create the animation.
You can use motion tweens which essentially "fill-in" the motion in between two keyframes. Once created you can modify it to your liking. You can edit motion paths in the tweens, rotate the objects. and even do parallax scrolling. This is by far one of the best upgrades in the Flash software from its last version. It appears the previous version was a little slow going.
One of the coolest tools I learned was the bone tool. Sounds creepy, but it's awesome. You can make objects look like they have joints so that when one part of the object connected by the bone tool moves, the other pieces move in a fashion they would if they were connected by bones/joints. You will need to set up the bone structure first before you animate. You will also need to make sure you are working in a movie instance and not with a graphic symbol. Just click and drag after selecting the bone tool to create hinges. Make sure to always start from the point that will be anchored, for instance if you were using the bone tool on someone's arm you would start on their shoulder and work down to the hand. The motion created by the bone tool is caused Inverse Kinematics. Also known as IK animations.
There is so much more to do with Flash that there is just not enough to share with all of you. This may require another post. It was very slow going working along with the tutorial with the sample files and taking notes, but I'm glad I challenged myself with this software and really look forward into diving into another soon.
For some reason, Lynda.com would only let me go to 99% so I couldn't view my certificate. Here's a pic to show how far I progressed.
