Flash: Frame by Frame Animation

Creating Frame-by-Frame Animations:

• Create a new Flash document
• Draw a background (if necessary) and name it "Background"
• Create a new layer for your animated object(s)
• Draw an object that you want to animate
• Notice that there's a • in the framer where you drew your picture.  This indicates a "Keyframe"
• If you Right-Click on the box directly to the right of your Keyframe, you can do "Insert Keyframe" -- or "Insert Blank Keyframe" if you would like to start with a blank frame.
• You may notice that you no longer see a background on your "movie" -- this is okay because it's easy to fix at the end.  You simply right-click in the very last frame on the "Background" layer and choose "Insert Frame".
• Next, save your movie to your Thawspace [as an FLA] and do a CTRL+ENTER to test your movie.

What is Animation?

Traditional animation (Disney cartoons, Spongebob, anime and manga) is an illusion of movement.  You don't actually see things moving -- you see a series of drawings placed one after another [around 24-30 images per second] which makes your brain believe it sees movement.  That phenomenon is called Persistence of Vision.  Traditionally an artist draws/paints 24-30 drawings for every 1 second of animation.  With computers as tools, artists have the luxury of having computers complete the "in-between" frames automatically.  For example, you draw two shapes: a circle in one corner of the screen on frame 1 and then in the opposite corner around 10 seconds later -- and then you tell the computer to figure out the "in-between" (or "tween").

The nice thing about computerized "tweens" is that image one can be a tiny red circle and image 2 can be a large green square, and the computer will gradually morph them from frame to frame.

Here is a sample video:

Over 100 years ago "arcades" were full of machines that people would put coins in and look through the viewfinder as they turned a crank which would flip through a series of photographs on a big spool.  More modern examples of this technology is a "flip book".  Typically these are done by rapidly flipping through images to create the illusion of motion.

Here's a great example of using Post-It notes to create a flip book movie:

Here's an example of animation using a MUCH slower "frame rate": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=783uWoSqdX0