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Flash Basics: Tweening

Take a look at these tutorials that cover the basics of shape and motion tweening, as well as exploring the more detailed options.

Creating Your First Flash Animation

In this lesson we'll cover how to create a new blank movie file in Flash MX, and the tools and steps involved in making your first simple animation using motion tweening and basic shapes.

Flash Tip: Shape Hints

Shape Hints make it easier for Flash to interpret how it's supposed to morph one complex shape into another in a shape tween.

Flash Tip: Shape Tweening Expanded: Controlling Hue

Create a fading gradient effect using shape tweens.

Flash Tip: Shape Tweening Expanded: Controlling Alpha

Use shape tweens to create a fading opacity effect.

Flash Tip: Motion Tweening Expanded: Motion Guides

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but that doesn't mean you have to tween that way. Learn how to assign your Flash Motion Tweens to paths called Motion Guides, so that you can animate along complex paths with only two keyframes.

Flash Tip: Motion Tweening Expanded: Easing

Another way to control your Flash motion tweens is through an option called Easing.

Flash Tip: Motion Tweening Expanded: Rotation

In the first Flash lesson, we covered motion tweening as a basic "Point A to Point B" process but you can also use motion tweens to rotate your symbols.

Flash Animation 7: Let's Move, Baby.

It's time to get our characters moving, using the movie clip symbols that we set up in previous lessons to control our limbs as a whole, and in sub-parts--and also to animate our facial features and give them expression and lip movements.

Flash Animation 6: Using Text in Flash to Give Your Character a Voice

This will be a fairly simple lesson. Before we get into animating the limbs, we're going to add speech bubbles--we'll learn about adding actual audio tracks later--to learn about working with text in Flash, and to give our characters a "voice" to communicate with the viewer.

Flash Animation 5: Creating a Complex Character of Movable Parts

In this lesson, we're going to learn how to "cheat' on making detailed animated characters in Flash without actually drawing every frame.

Flash Animation 4: Animating Your E-card

Now that we’ve set the stage for our E-card, let’s go ahead and animate it. For the first part of that, we’re going to use a new kind of symbol called a Movie Clip.

Flash Animation 3: Fireworks E-card

This tutorial offers you a chance to get more familiar with using Flash's drawing tools to set a scene for an animation, and a few little gradient and fill tricks. This part of the lesson will walk you through creating the scene for a Fourth of July exploding fireworks E-card; a future lesson will demonstrate how to animate it.

Flash Animation 2: Shape Tweening

With this lesson, we'll pick up at the end of where we left off in Lesson 1, with a lesson on shape tweening in Flash MX.

Flash Tip: Animating/Tweening Gradients

Colorful shape tweens aren't limited just to solid colors; you can also tween gradients to change colors, and fade in and out of each other.
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