Shape Tweening for Control Freaks

SHAPE TWEENING FOR CONTROL-FREAKS

Timothy Boronczyk

Flash supports two types of tweening to make animating less tedious, motion tweening and shape tweening. As opposed to drawing each frame as with a flipbook, one only needs to draw a keyframe with the starting location/shape and another keyframe later in the timeline with the ending location/shape. (Flash gives less paper cuts than a flipbook, too!)

In addition to making life easy, tweening helps reduce the file size of the finished Flash presentation. Flash only needs to save information about the objects at the beginning and ending keyframes and not the frames in-between them… And we all want to make tighter, leaner, meaner presentations, right? This tutorial will help you do just that by focusing on shape tweening with the aid of shape hints.

To begin, open a new movie (FILE<%gt%>New…) and adjust the movie’s height and width to 300px by accessing the document property box (MODIFY<%gt%>Document…). You may wish to increase the frame rate for a smoother animation, but this is a matter of preference and not necessary for this tutorial. I tend to set mine between 20-24 frames per second, depending on my mood.