Creating Animation > Animation overview |  |

Animation overview

You create animation in a Macromedia Flash MX document by changing the contents of successive frames. You can make an object move across the Stage, increase or decrease its size, rotate, change color, fade in or out, or change shape. Changes can occur independently of, or in concert with, other changes. For example, you can make an object rotate and fade in as it moves across the Stage.

There are two methods for creating an animation sequence in Flash: tweened animation, and frame-by-frame animation. In tweened animation, you create starting and ending frames and let Flash create the frames in between. Flash varies the object's size, rotation, color, or other attributes evenly between the starting and ending frames to create the appearance of movement. See About tweened animation. In frame-by-frame animation, you create the image in every frame. See About frame-by-frame animation.

To simplify the process of creating tweened animation, you can distribute multiple objects to separate layers. See Distributing objects to layers for tweened animation.

You can use a mask layer to create a hole through which the contents of one or more underlying layers are visible. Using an animated movie clip, you can create a dynamic layer mask. See Using mask layers.

For an interactive introduction to animation, choose Help > Lessons > Creating Tweened Animation.

Note: You can also create animation programmatically using ActionScript to change the properties of an object, symbol, or instance. For more information about the ActionScript language, see Understanding the ActionScript Language. For detailed information about using ActionScript elements, see the online ActionScript Dictionary in the Help menu.