g 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 the movement of an object as well as its shape and color.
The next section will show you how to animate the graphics on this page. One final note: The graphics we created in Chapter 1, "The Basics," are the final product of the animation. We will be working backward and modifying the first keyframe, while leaving the last one alone. To get a clearer picture of this, go look at the finished product at http://www.phptr.com/essential/flash5/shelley/new/ and notice that the page ends up looking like our current file, but looks totally different when you first see it.