Frame by Frame Animation

• Timeline area - double clicking the frame rate is a quick way to bring up the document properties box; elapsed time is the time elapsed from Frame 1 to the current Playhead location at the current frame rate
• Keyframe is a potential point of change in animation - a blank keyframe is represented by a hollow circle in the timeline, when the keyframe has content, the circle becomes solid.
• F5 - Insert Frame - the content from the previous keyframe will continue to be displayed
• F6 - Insert Keyframe - the content (except for actions and sounds) is copied from the previous keyframe.
• F7 - Insert Blank Keyframe -
• Clear Keyframe (Shift F6) - removes the content but leaves the frame.
• Deleting frames - Click and drag or shift-click to select them and then Edit>Timeline>Remove Frames or right-click.
• Previewing movie - (1) Scrub the playhead, or (2) Hit Enter, or (3) Control>Test Movie -- this generates a .swf file which plays in the Flash Player, one can control looping by choosing, within the Player, Control>Loop Playback. (4) File>Publish Preview>Default HTML generates the .swf ifle plus an html file to display the .swf file.

Exercise 1 - Frame-by-Frame Animation with Keyframes - use F6 if you want the frames to accumulate content, e.g. spelling out your name but use F7 if you want a frame to have only new content, with nothing from earlier frames.

Exercise 2 - Onion Skinning - At the bottom of the timeline, click the second button from the left (Onion Skin). You will be able to see a ghost image of the content of other frames on the stage. This allows you to change the current artwork relative to the ghost images. Which frames you see through onion skinning are controlled through the Onion Skin Markers, which are the draggable brackets that appear at the top of the Timeline after you click the Onion Skin button.

Exercise 3 - Inserting and Deleting Frames - Adjusting the frame rate affects the speed of the animation, but it affects the entire movie. By inserting and deleting frames, one can adjust the speed of parts of the movie. You can insert frames by hitting F5. To remove frames, you can select them by clicking and dragging and then choosing Insert>Remove Frames, the keyboard shortcut Shift-F5 or by right clicking.

General

The purpose of this file is so that the movie will automatically begin playing in Internet Explorer without the user having to click on the movie. If this reference is generated, it is essential that the external .js file be uploaded to the folder on the server that is referenced through the relative reference to the JavaScript file.

When the Flash movie is published, the authoring environment will generate the HTML necessary to display the Flash movie in a web page. To use this Flash movie inside a web page, one needs to use all the HTML generated by Flash between the <object>and </object> tags and the generated JavaScript in the head and body section of the page. One can copy all this information to a web page, or edit the HTML file generated by Flash.

An alternative way to display the Flash movie in an existing web page is to open the existing page in Dreamweaver, put the insertion point at the appropriate place in the file, and select Insert>Media>SWF. Dreamweaver will generate the reference to the .swf file and to an external JavaScript file. To ensure that your Flash movie can be viewed in a web page on the internet, you must upload the HTML file, the .swf file, and the external JavaScript file to the locations specified in the relative addresses for each.

Revised: November 7, 2011. Comments to William Pegram, bill@billpegram.com