Creating Your First Flash Animation

Now before we jump right into animating, let's take a look at another area of the window: the timeline, set above the work area (depicted in the image below). The timeline is divided into two columns: the Layers column, and the actual timeline itself, divided into individual frames; the sliding red line marks your current position in the timeline. The timeline is one of the most important tools in Flash MX; it allows you to keep track of your various objects and shapes and which layer they're on, as well as keeping track of your animation key frames and their timing and placement. Most of the work of your animations will be done here.

As you can see, right now we have one layer (containing the circle drawn in the previous step) with one timeline associated with that layer. The first frame of the timeline is grayed out, with a small black dot marking it; what that means is that this frame is a key frame, created automatically when you drew the circle on that frame. In order to animate using tweening, you must define key frames; without them Flash has no beginning or ending points to animate in between.