Creating In-Between Frames

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Creating In-Between Frames

The frames that appear between keyframes are in a sense tied to the keyframe that precedes them. They display its content and allow you a space in which to create tweened animation (see Chapters 9 and 10). Flash makes the connections between these frames clear by highlighting them and placing a hollow rectangle at the end of the keyframe span.

To add in-between frames:

1. Create a new Flash document with keyframes and content in Frame 1 and Frame 2.

2. In the Timeline, position the playhead in Frame 1.

3. From the Insert menu, choose Frame, or press F5 on the keyboard.

   Flash adds an in-between frame (Figure 8.9). Your movie now contains a keyframe at Frame 1, an in-between frame at Frame 2, and another keyframe at Frame 3.

   Figure 8.9. The Insert > Frame command adds an in-between frame after the selected frame. Unlike Insert > Keyframe and Insert > Blank Keyframe, which merely convert a selected in-between frame or protoframe to a keyframe, the Insert > Frame command actually adds a new frame to your movie.

   

What Are Keyframes and In-Between Frames?

In the early days of animation, it took veritable armies of artists to create the enormous number of drawings that frame-by-frame animation requires. To keep costs down, the studios broke the work into various categories based on the artistic skill required and the pay provided. The work might start with creating spec sheets for each character. Then came storyboards that outlined the action over the course of the animation. Eventually, individual artists drew and painted hundreds of cels, each slightly different, to bring the animation to life.

To make the process manageable, animators broke each movement into a series of the most crucial frames that define a movement, called keyframes , and frames that incorporate the incremental changes necessary to simulate the movement, called in-between frames .

Keyframes define a significant change to a character or object. Imagine a 25-frame sequence in which Bugs Bunny starts out facing the audience and then turns to his right to look at Daffy Duck. This scene requires two keyframesBugs in a face-on view and Bugs in profileand 23 in-between frames.

In the early days, some artists specialized in creating keyframes. Other artistsusually lower-paidhad the job of creating the frames that fell in between the keyframes. These in-betweeners (or tweeners, for short) copied the drawings in the keyframes, making just the slight adjustments necessary to create the intended movement in the desired number of frames while retaining the continuity of the character. In Chapters 9 and 10, you learn how to turn Flash into your own personal wage slave. The program takes on the drudgery of in-betweening for certain types of animation.

In Flash, you must use keyframes to define any change in the content or image, no matter how large or small the change. Flash doesn't use the term in-between frames; it simply uses the term frame for any frames that are not defined as keyframes. For clarity, the exercises in this book use the term in-between frames to refer to any defined frames that are not keyframes.

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