Subtitles of the Movie

Now that I've demonstrated several frame by frame animations, this would be a good time to review in detail a tool that I introduced you to; I couldn't help but introduce you to, cause it's such a useful tool when you're setting up your animations, especially frame by frame animations, and that's the Onion Skinning tool right down here at the base of the timeline, Onion Skin. This Onion Skinning lets you see a ghost image of the previous key frame so you can see where you want to place artwork in relation to the previous frames. In this case, I want to do a little arc. I want this oval to move in an arc here and by turning on this Onion Skinning, I can see very precisely where the next key frame will be and where the third key frame will be and where the fourth key frame will be. If I move back here to the fourth key frame and then I extend the start of the Onion Skinning to frame one, I can see the previous key frame, so that will allow me, for example, let's say that I don't wanna do an arc, I wanna just do up and then back down again, so I can do something like this. It goes up and down and up again. Notice with the Onion Skinning, it makes it very easy to see what that animation will look like. Let's turn off the Onion Skinning and now let's preview this, and you can see that it's jumping up, down, and then up again. So notice that after you click on the Onion Skin button, a gray bar appears up here with dragable brackets on each end. These are called Onion Skin markers. The Start Onion Skin marker is the one on the left, and the End Onion Skin Marker is the one on the right, so you can hide or show your various key frames by moving the Onion Skin's start and end markers and the way you move them. It's a little tricky to move them as you click and drag to the right or left. Let me show another example, another animation where the onion skinning is helpful, and that is my frame by frame typewriter or keyboarding effect. Notice if I open up my Onion Skin End Marker all the way to the end, I can see all of my letters and I can also notice that I have some problems with the end and the A; there's something going on there with multiple letters, so I can see that with the Onion Skinning. It helps me determine if there's going to be problems and predict how the animation will come out. And that will conclude my review of basic animation techniques with Flash CS3. In this section of the tutorial, you've learned much more about the timeline and about frames and key frames, key frame holders and blank key frames. I've demonstrated several frame by frame animations and how to set up the frame rates to make your animations run faster or slower or to increase or decrease the span of your animations. I've also demonstrated how to insert and remove frames and key frames, as well as a very handy Onion Skinning tool, which shows you a ghost image of the previous and next key frames so you can see where you want to place artwork in relation to the proceeding key frames.