Anatomy of an Animation

Animation is a complex subject, and Flash is a complex program. You'll have a much easier time plowing through the rest of the book if you start with a couple of basics under your belt: specifically , what an animation is and how you go about creating one in Flash. This section and the following one give you some background.

UP TO SPEED
Future Flash

Some industry pundits see Adobe's recent acquisition of Macromediacoupled with new Flash-compatible server software, beefed-up Flash support for handling video, and the disturbing tendency of both Macromedia and Adobe to throw around the phrase "enterprise applications"as a not-so-subtle move to reposition Flash away from being a simple animation design program and toward being a full-fledged program authoring environment .

The difference between the two terms is mostly in the minds of marketing geeks ; after all, an interactive Web site or tutorial created using Flash is , by definition, a program. But if history is any indication, this shift in focus means you can expect future versions of Flash to be much more feature-rich (and correspondingly expensive and difficult to use).

Animators typically develop animations in a frame-by-frame sequence, where every frame contains a different image. As the frames speed by on a projector, the hundreds (or hundreds of thousands) of static images create the illusion of moving characters .

Painstaking work? You bet. Before the age of computerized generationwhich has really just come into its own in the last 15 years or so, with big names like Pixar major animation houses employed whole armies of graphic artists , each charged with producing hundreds of drawings that represented a mere fraction of the finished work. What we yukked at for a scant few minutes took weeks and dozens of tired , cramped hands to produce. One mistake, one spilled drop of coffee, and these patient-as-Job types would have to grab fresh paper and start all over again. When everything was done, the animation would have to be put togethermuch like one of those flip books where you flip pages real fast to see a story play out while it was being filmed by special cameras .

Well, Flash brings you the power of a design studio, expert tools, and the equivalent of a staff of highly trained detail people. You still have to come up with an idea for the animation, and you have to draw (or find and import) at least a couple of images. But beyond that, Flash can take over and generate most of the frames you need to flesh out your animation.

It's pretty incredible, when you think about it. A few hundred bucks and a few hours spent working with Flash, and you've got an animation that, just a few years ago, you'd have had to pay a swarm of professionals union scale to produce. Sweet!