Flashing your Logo with a Beam of Light - Page 4

Part 4: Really shining now: The Animation

All right, you've done lots of work, I suggest you rest now. Take a walk round the house and stuff. Come back to the computer 5 minutes later. You'll be relieved when you hear this: The Animation is much easier! Wooh! Great!

Okay, now grab the center circle and drag to the top left until none of the lines touch the part you want to shine. What's shown below is what I mean. Yeah - move the whole thing away from the shining parts.

Now click away and watch the whole thing disappear. During all the process, you should be on the Layer 2 layer. If you're not, you've messed up, start all over again. Now insert a new keyframe on frame 20 on Layer 2. Click again on the part you want to shine, and do the same thing, but now down to the bottom right. Again, the process is shown below. Those of you who have seen Flash at work before would know why we're doing this. If not, just listen. Now just click away and watch the whole thing disappear. All right, now there's one thing left to do: (ah, the word sounds familiar) Tweening.

Now, click on frame 1, and open the Frame panel (WindowPanelsFrame). In the Tweening drop-down box, select Shape. At the moment you click, something attracts your attention: you see that that frame 1 to 20 turns green, with an arrow! Now, close the Frame panel. Now, on Layer 1, click on frame 20, and press F5, or right-click and choose Insert Frame. Back to frame 1, press Enter, and watch the thing shine! For smoother animation, change the Movie's frame rate to 20, like I did.

The timeline should look like what's below. But stay tuned: In Part 5, we're going to add sound! If you liked my sound in the first part of the demonstration, this is how, you are going to add it! So roll up your sleeves and prepare for the most fun part!