Learn how to animate with Keyframes in Adobe Flash CS3.
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Now, as you can probably see key frames are going to be the most important thing that contributed to our animation. It is what we have happen over a timeline as we want things to change.
Now, in the case of out particular animation here, I do not really want any of the facial parts disappearing at this point so one of the things that I will usually do to get started on animation is to go out and add a bunch of frames to all the layers and that way I have a little bit of room to play around in with my key frames.
So, let us do that right now. I am going to go out to frame eighty and I will just click on frame 80 at the top layer and drag down and there you see I can select that column for all the layers. I will press F5 and now I have added 80 frames to all of my layers so I do not have anything disappearing off the screen.
Let us try out our key frames again. We have our robot looking up to see the lightning volt, looks like it is going to hit him and then let us say his eyes kind of bogged out a little bit. I am going to take eye two here. Let us put to frame 20. I am going to add another key frame because I want to make another change. I will just press F6 and you can see a copy of the last graphic forward. I will just move that eye down a little bit since it is already selected and we will zoom in on it just so we can see what we are doing here.
Of course, that is command plus and CTRL plus on the PC and I am going to switch over to my free transform tool so we can scale this up. I will turn off snapping so we do not snap up against any of the other objects and we can just scale this up a little bit.
Now, here is a great tip when you are using the scale tool. You will notice that it is scaling from one corner to another. If you would ever like to change from a corner scale to a center scale, you can actually hold your option key down and you will see with the option key down are now scaling from the center out and of course, that would be the ALT key on the PC.
Now, this will work both ways if you are scaling from the center and you would like to do it from the corner, you can hold your option or ALT key down there as well. Now, let us set up the other eye at the same time. I will just add a key frame at the same spot so we will select eye one at frame 20 and press F6 and once again we have got that copied art work. I will drag it down some sort of the middle there and I will scale it up again.
Now, looks like I get to use my ALT or option key trick again here just scale up in the center. It looks like kind of panic now and we will add two more key frames so that his eyes pop back to normal size. Now, just so we can try this, I want to try a slightly different method of adding a key frame for eye two.
So, let us go to the insert menu. You will notice under timeline, we have frame, key frame and we also have blank key frame. Now, the key frame itself is actually represented by the dot, by inserting a blank key frame, what we have basically done is we have the place where we can draw a graphic but right now there is nothing in the frame but when we do a normal key frame it actually makes the key frame but also copies the graphic forward.
I can place any thing I want to in this key frame. I actually want the eyeball to go back to its normal size so I can go back to any one of the other locations like parenthesis the very first key frame and there you can see I have got the eyeball selected. I will just use command C or CTRL C on the PC to copy that and if I go out to frame 25, I can paste that graphic into this empty key frame.
If I just used command V or CTRL V, I am going to paste in the center but if I used command-shift V or CTRL-shift V I have got to paste right back into the same spot. Let us do the same thing for the other eye.
Now, the keyboard shortcut for blank key frame is F7 so I will press that instead of going up to the menu this time. I will go back to key frame one for this one and copy the eyeball out. We will go up to frame 25 and I will command-shift V, paste it in place.
Now, we can get a feel for how animations are working by scrolling along to the frames. We start out with them looking at us, he kind of looks up here, his eyes get big and then they go back down again. So, maybe he is scared of that lightning volt coming in.
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