This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Workshop
The Workshop consists of quiz questions and answers to help you solidify your understanding of the material covered. Try to answer the questions before checking the answers. Be sure to read the explanations even if you get the answers right.
Quiz
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If you draw an image onstage in a keyframe, how long does that image remain onstage?
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Just the one frame in which you drew the image.
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Until another keyframe containing a different image is encountered.
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For the entire Timeline.
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How many frames are necessary to create an animation?
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One.
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Two or more.
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No fewer than three.
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In what part of this book will we actually get to animate?
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In the next 2 hours.
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In the last 2 hours.
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This is it—we've been creating animations all hour!
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Quiz Answers
B. Think of a keyframe as your telling Flash to put an image onstage now and leave it there until notified otherwise (by another keyframe).
B. Although a feature-length movie may have 24 different images each second, you can imply motion very effectively with just 2 frames.
C. Frame-by-frame animation is animation. The other types of animation we're going to cover are those in which Flash takes care of the frames between keyframes that we create. If nothing else, you should now understand keyframes clearly.
Exercise
Here's a great exercise that will let you experience an entirely different way of creating. Unlike the stick man exercises (where we created each new keyframe based on the previous keyframe), this time we'll draw an entirely new graphic into each keyframe.
Let's draw a bird flying. First select frames 1 to 100 and use Modify, Frames, Convert to Blank Keyframes. Turn on Onion Skin so you can view just the previous two frames. Start on frame 1 and draw the bird (just use the Brush to draw a curved V shape). Press the Next Frame quick key—. (the period key)—and, using the onion skin as a guide, draw another V that moves across the screen. You can go pretty quickly: next frame, V, next frame, V.... If you want the bird to move fast, increase the space between the current V and the previous one. This exercise is good for experimenting with different types of motion.