Flash Animation 3: Fireworks E-card

From Adrien-Luc Sanders, former About.com Guide

Since the Fourth of July is coming up, let’s make a “Happy 4th” E-card, complete with animated fireworks. This will be a two-part lesson; the first will cover drawing the scene and creating the static fireworks, and the second will cover animating the fireworks bursting and adding animated text.

So to start off, let’s create our landscape for the animation. The landscape will remain static for the entire animation; in keeping with the theme, we can work with something simple: a city skyline against a dark night sky.

Open a new document in Flash. First we’ll set the canvas color for the animation; since the main base of the scene is the night sky, we’ll pick a dark blue by going to Modify -> Document (or hit Ctrl+J for a shortcut) and selecting a dark blue background color using the color picker; I’ve chosen an indigo shade.

While you’re there, change the document size from the default to a 320w x 240h, to use a standard 4:3 web production aspect ratio. Leave the frame rate at 12 fps.