Creating a Simple Animation in Flash CS4
       by kirupa  |  23 October 2008

Flash CS4, much like its predecessors, is a great tool for creating animations. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a simple animation that broadly covers the timeline and some related features.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have learned to create something similar to the following fading in / out animation:

You will create something very similar to this in this tutorial, so let's get started. Go ahead and launch Flash CS4, and create a new file.

Let's Get Started
The following steps will help you re-create the above animation:

1. Launch Flash CS4 if you have not already. The New Document window will appear. From this window, select Flash File (ActionScript 3.0) and click OK:

2. Once you have done that, the New Document window will disappear and you will see a blank design surface that you can work in. The size of your design area is a little large, so let's change that.
    
   On the right, you should see your Properties pane. Click on the Edit button next to Size: 500 x 400 px:

3.  Once you have clicked the Edit button, the Document Properties window will appear. Under Dimensions, enter 400 for the width and 250 for the height:

After you have entered those values, press OK to close the Document Properties window and to have your design area resized to 400 x 250.

4. Ok, now we have our design area setup. It is time to actually begin creating the animation. First off, copy the following image and paste it anywhere inside your Flash document:

5. Once you have pasted this file, make sure it is positioned towards the left edge of your design area:

6. With your image in the right location, take a look at your timeline - the large area towards the bottom of your Flash window with all of those numbers and grids.
    
   Find the keyframe (the solid circle) on Frame 1 of your Layer 1 layer:

7. Once you found that keyframe, right-click on it and select Create Motion Tween:

8. A brief moment later, you will see more frames added with your playhead moving to Frame 24, the last frame in our sequence:

Your playhead is the red rectangle with a vertical line. It is used to indicate where in your animation your design surface is currently at.

9. With your playhead on Frame 24, look at your stage. Your image is currently on the left edge. Select it, and using your arrow keys, move it towards the right edge:

10. With your image now on the right edge, press your Enter key. When you press Enter, notice that you are seeing the box animate from the left-hand side of your stage to the right-hand side.
    
    You can also preview frame-by-frame by clicking on your playhead and dragging it to the frame you want to preview:

Anyway, so far so good. You started out with a static image, and now you are able to create a quick animation that slides your image from one side of your stage to another.

11. Currently, this animation is a little too fast. Let's fix that by increasing the number of frames it takes for our animation to complete. To do that, hover over the right-most edge of your frame sequence (at Frame 24). Your mouse cursor will change to display the horizontal resize cursor:

Once you see that cursor, click and drag to the right until you hit Frame 50:

12. Now that you are at Frame 50, if you happen to preview your animation again, you will notice that it takes about twice as long for the animation to move from one edge of the screen to the other.
     
    If you want to preview your animation independent of your stage, press Ctrl + Enter where your animation will be displayed in the Flash Player window.
13. Getting back to my example, I actually have the image fading in and then fading out. Currently, your image is visible throughout the entire animation. Let's fix that. While you are at Frame 50, make sure your image is selected and look over in the Properties pane.
     
    You should see the Style drop-down inside the Color Effect category:

14. Click on the Style drop-down, and select the menu that appears, select the entry for Alpha. Once you have done that, you will see the Alpha slider appear below it. Slide that slider all the way to the 0 position:

Notice that once you have done that, the image on your stage is now invisible:

15. If you happen to play back your animation, you will see that it starts out as visible and then becomes invisible. This is good, but we want it to start out invisible, fade in to visibility, and then fade back into invisibility towards the end.
     
    To fix this, drag your playhead to Frame 1. Once you are at Frame 1, make sure your image is selected. From the Properties panel, repeat what you did in Steps xiii and xiv to set the Alpha of your image at Frame 1 to be 0 as well:

16. If you preview your animation now, notice that you nothing is displayed. This doesn't seem like we are heading in the right direction, does it? Actually, we aren't doing too bad.
    
    We have our starting and ending state of our image set. It is fully invisible at Frame 1 and Frame 50. What we need to do is make sure it is fully visible somewhere in-between those two frames.
     
    Click on Frame 25 to move your playhead slider to that location:

17. Once at Frame 25, click on your image again. Because your image is invisible, click somewhere in the middle of the green transition dots to select your invisible image.
     
    With your image selected, look at the Color Effect category of your Properties pane. You should see the Alpha slider already displayed. Move the Alpha slider all the way from 0 to 100:

18. Right now, if you look at your stage, notice that your image is fully visible:

Better yet, preview your animation now. Notice that you have created the animation that you set out to create! You have an image that starts out invisible, becomes fully visible, and then disappears again.

This is a Little Different...
If you are familiar with creating animations in earlier versions of Flash, you may find the information in this tutorial to be a bit different than what you may expect. That will be covered towards the end.

One of the first things you will notice about Flash CS4 is that tweening objects is a little different. In the past, you would basically do the following: place object, insert keyframe at starting point, insert keyframe at ending point, modify the object, insert keyframe, right click on first keyframe and select Create Motion Tween.

Onwards to the next page!