Adobe Flash

Making Animations with Easing in Flash

This tutorial guides you through the process of using the tweening tools in Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8. Tweening is the process of animating a graphic by setting starting and ending values for its properties and letting Flash calculate the values in between. The term tween comes from "in between".

A simple example of a tween would be to place a graphic at the top of the Stage and then add several frames to the Timeline and move the graphic to the bottom of the Stage in the last frame. By letting Flash fill in the position values for the frames in between, you can easily create a smooth animation of the graphic from the top of the Stage to the bottom.

Flash Professional also lets you exercise fine control over how the tweened property values are calculated, so you can easily create more complex animations. By using the Custom Ease In / Ease Out window, you can control the speed at which the changes to properties are applied at the beginning, middle, and end of your animations. Careful use of this window can yield visually compelling results.

This tutorial takes you through the process of creating an animation by tweening different properties of a graphic using the various tweening controls in the Flash authoring environment.

After examining the completed animation, you'll begin by opening a starter Flash document and end by publishing the document for web playback. The tutorial should take approximately 20 minutes to complete.

Before you take this tutorial you should read "Flash Basics", in Flash Help.