Our first task to start in Flash was to create an animated alphabet. At first I just made letters go from side to side, but this quickly built up to more complicated techniques, including changing colours of letters, making them spin and rotate, making them change in size and moving them around the screen.
Shown above is the workspace in Flash. I took this screenshot after doing a lot of work on my project, which can be seen with the amount of scenes and library items on the left.
To make letters usable in animation you have to convert them to Graphic Symbols. This makes them fully customizable and controllable in animation. After doing this you can start creating frames and altering the motion of the animation.
For simple animations like this, Motion Tweening is used to fill in the space between the frames and 'complete' the animation. This means the frames do not have to be created individually and makes the animation a lot smoother than it would be if every frame had to be created manually.
To start creating a more complicated animation I created a figure, in this case a robot, in Photoshop. I created each part of the robot individually on separate layers so I could animate them one-by-one later on.
When I imported this into Flash each layer was added individually. I turned each one into a Graphic Symbol so I could control and animate them more easily later on.
After spending some time animating my robot I decided I wanted to change the look of it to make it look more interesting. To do this I changed the textures of different parts of the robot, and edited some of the shapes slightly.
