Steps How to Create a Flash Animation

In recent times, there have been huge advancements in the field of animations and 3D movies. Many are interested in the methods and tools used for creating such animated pictures and videos, and creating a flash animation is the most basic step in the process of learning advanced animations and motion graphics, and it is much simpler in terms of complexity, compared to advanced levels of 3D animation.

Software and Templates

To begin with, you would need a designing software to develop such flash animations. The most popular software widely used for this includes Adobe Flash, Macromedia Flash, and much more. Also, after understanding the basic concepts of creating a flash animation, it is advisable to try some of the pre-existing animation templates available online, to understand more about the designing techniques and standards.

The First Basic Steps

After installing Adobe Flash or Adobe Animate in your system, there are a few basic steps that you would need to follow every time you create a new flash animation. In the case of Adobe Flash, you need to follow the following steps:

• After opening the software, create a new flash document.
• Create a new keyframe for different points of the animation. A flash animation is a simple combination of various frames combined together to form a single animation.
• After creating these blank keyframes, the next step is to assign a graphic or an image to each of these blank keyframes.
• Now, after each of the keyframes is allocated with an image, all you need to do is play the animation by pressing Enter.

Also, you can also use Adobe Animate to create animations of different types, and the basic steps to follow are:

• Start with setting the animation stage and properties of the document. An important feature in the case of Adobe Animate is that it provides much more advanced design methods than Adobe Flash, which is why there is the need for managing more advanced settings every time you design a new animation.
• Create layers, frames and other components of the main timeline. A major difference in the case of Adobe Animate is that it allows you to animate multiple components of the animation in each frame along with their attributes. This brings in the misconception that working with Adobe Animate is hard and requires a good amount of expertise.
• After completing the different attributes of the animation, such as the scenes, layers, etc., you can finally publish your project in the different formats as per your requirement.

Complexity and Design Process

Both Adobe Flash and Adobe Animate follow different methods for designing the animations and are used for different purposes across different applications on the web, interactive applications, etc. You need to have an idea in mind initially, and this idea further decides each object used in the animation. You can try a running cowboy, or design a man running around in any of hoverboards from the many hoverboard reviews available online.

Also, according to the type of animation work that you are trying to accomplish in your project, there are different types of animations that decide the manner in which an object moves from the first to the last frame. In Adobe Flash, the movement from the first frame to the last frame is further filled by a process called “tweening”, which is the process of generating these intermediate frames. There are mainly 4 types of methods used for creating a flash animation, i.e. motion tween, guided motion tween, shape tween and frame by frame animation.

Each software that you can use for creating a flash animation has varying complexities for developing an animation, and the most basic one to start with is Adobe Flash.

The Learning Curve

Each individual has different learning speed, and the best tools to start with if you are a beginner is Adobe Flash or Macromedia Flash. The advantage that these applications provide is their simpler interface and basic components, which can be easily grasped by any newbie. Further, once you are familiar with the basic functionalities of the above-mentioned tools, you can try other advanced tools such as Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere, etc.

The basic concept behind creating a flash animation is “frames”. You have the option of editing the different components of each frame in a flash animation, and once these frames are prepared, the trick is running these frames at speeds that are perceivable by the human eye.