s, select it, choose Edit → Cut, click on the appropriate new layer (according to the text link overlapping it), and choose Edit → Paste in Place.
When all the circles have been moved, the Circles layer will have nothing left in it. Get rid of it by selecting it and choosing Delete Layer from the Layer menu.
Select and drag the layers up and down to move them. Put your layers in the following order, from top to bottom:
Header Text. This is the Shelley Biotech banner and associated shadow.
Address Sphere. This is the sphere under the Address Text.
Link Circle layers. Each of the seven circles should be in a separate layer.
Logo. This consists of the seven lines that connect the link circles.
Background 1. The white curve.
Background 2. The brown curve.
This would be a good time to save your work. Choose File → Save As, and save this file in the directory of your choice as shelley.fla. Download the project at this point from http://www.phptr.com/essential/flash5 or view it directly at http://www.phptr.com/essential/flash5/shelley/shelley2-2.html.
Frames and Animation
One of the most important aspects of a Flash movie is the animation, which is nothing more than a series of still images, displayed over time. Each of these still images is called a frame. The speed at which the frames are displayed is controlled by the fps (frames per second) setting in Flash. A setting of 12 fps, which is the default setting, means that 12 frames will be displayed every second.
There are two ways to change the fps value:
Double-click the fps box, which is located just below the timeline. See Figure 24.
FIGURE 24 The frames per second box.
Choose the menu option Modify → Movie.
Both of these open the Movie Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 25. The first blank on this dialog box contains the frame rate. A rate between 8 and 15 is recommended. This range allows relatively speedy processing of the animation while retaining smoothness of motion. For our animation, make sure the value is set at 12.
FIGURE 25 The Movie Properties dialog box. The frames per second rate can be changed here.
Tweening and Keyframes
Before the advent of computers, cartoon animators had to draw each frame of an animation. Although you can do that with Flash, you are provided with a time-saving method of animation that requires you to create only the most important frames. Flash creates the intermediate frames for you. This is called tweening. In using tweening, you create only special frames, called keyframes, to serve as turning points during an animation, and Flash fills in the gaps. For example, if you wanted to animate an object moving to the right, hitting the edge of the screen, and moving left, you would only have to create three keyframes, and tell Flash to do the rest.
Adding Keyframes to the Shelley Biotech Page
We can now put in place the keyframes we will need for the Shelley page.
Open the latest version of the Shelley file. This can be downloaded from http://www.phptr.com/essential/flash5/shelley/shelley2-2.html.
We now need to select the thirtieth frame of all the layers. To do this, click and hold on the frame area at the 30 frame mark of the top layer and drag downward until all the layers are selected, as shown in Figure 26. This is a little tricky.
FIGURE 26 Selecting the thirtieth frame of all the layers.
Choose Insert → Keyframe. Your timeline should now look like Figure 27.
FIGURE 27 Current timeline.
This would be a good time to save your work. Choose File → Save As, and save this file in the directory of your choice as shelley.fla. Download the project at this point from http://www.phptr.com/essential/flash5 or view it directly at http://www.phptr.com/essential/flash5/shelley/shelley2-3.html.
We still have no animation, even though we have multiple frames. If you click on the first or last keyframe or any frame in between, you will notice that nothing changes. Two things still need to be done: First, you select a keyframe and make some change to the graphic at that point. Then you must tell Flash what kind of tweening to use. Flash can tween 