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The task of producing animation by hand is none too simple. To automate this process and make your work more productive Macromedia Flash provides tools that will be briefly introduced here. It might take some time to get accustomed to these concepts, but this will pay as soon as we get to customizing the .FLA file. You will also need it opened now to do some practice. The tools that you'll need are layers, keyframes, and symbols.

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Layers are common to many graphical programs. You can think of them as of thin transparent films with text and images placed on them. You can change the order in which the films are stacked, edit their contents independently, and lots of other things.

What we will need most for now is modifying the appearance of layer contents (not the contents themselves). In Flash you can make contents of a layer invisible or display just contours. Try out both by following the steps below:

1. Open the .FLA file and adjust the view by selecting View>Magnification>Show All.

2. Make sure the Timeline is visible. If not, use View>Timeline to display it. (You can locate Timeline by turning it on and off with menu or upon consulting Help>Lessons>01 Introduction, which explains names and purposes of main interface windows).

3. Locate an eye icon in the top of layers list from the left side of timeline. Click on dots in the column beneath it. When a dot changes to a red cross it means that the corresponding layer was made invisible. Try to locate which elements that you see in the scene belong to which layers.

4. Locate a square icon, which is to the right of the eye icon. Click on squares beneath to display layers in contours. Solid square denotes normal display mode for this layer. In contour mode you are able to see objects with transparency turned on. This way you can identify more elements in the scene including those for which invisibility of a layer does not make any difference.

  

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Keyframes

There is another reason besides convenience for having layers in Flash. That is what is called tweening. The idea is simple: you specify properties of a shape in starting and ending frames, and Flash generates everything that is in beTWEEN. For such generation to be possible there can be just one animated shape per layer during each moment of time. To make many things happen simultaneously you need several layers. Each layer can have many frames with several of them containing shapes that the designer specified by hand - these are keyframes. You can tell keyframes by a dot they have. Ordinary frames are just white and gray squares to the right of layer name in Timeline. Tweening displays as an arrow between keyframes. Fill color varies depending on the type of shape properties changed. You will see violet-filled tweened frames most often. Violet means change of coordinate in time, in other words motion. Try selecting keyframes with a click. Note that a click on a tweened frame selects the entire range of frames for which tweening occurs - this is NOT what you want to do. When selecting keyframes notice that animated elements of that layer get selected. These are symbols. In fact, you customize your intro template by editing them.

    

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Symbols are building blocks of your Flash movie. They can be static graphics or text and they can be animation themselves. The most valuable property of these objects is that there is one and only "master copy" of symbol per movie. When you edit a symbol in one location all its occurrences change as well. You can view a complete list of movie symbols in the Library. Display the Library window by selecting Window>Library. You can start editing symbol names by double-clicking on text or you can go into symbol editing mode by double-clicking the icons from the left. When finished, select Edit>Movie to return to image editing mode.

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