Flash Animation 14: Gravity, Squash, and Stretch

With the holidays coming up, we might as well focus our efforts for a bit on making a winter-themed animation. This is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate a few classic animation techniques, and how to accomplish them in Flash. What we're going to focus on now isn't really new; you've learned everything that we'll do here already, but we're going to look at specific ways to apply those lessons to create realistic animation that gives weight, life, and realism to our moving shapes.

For that, I've set up a little winter scene; nothing fancy, just twenty minutes of scribble-work in Flash with the graphics tablet, the Brush tool, the Rectangle tool, and the Transform tool. What I'm going to animate is a rather large snowball bouncing into the scene, and for that we're going to use Flash's tweening techniques to simulate gravity and another founding technique of animation called squash and stretch.