Flash CS3
Looped Animations

Your animation has a timeline. We add frames and keyframes to the timeline so that we can specify what should happen at every point in our animation.

Symbols also have their own timeline. Shape tweens and motion tweens can be used within the symbol's own timeline to make a symbol with some animation built in.

1. Start by launching Adobe Flash CS3 and creating a new Flash document.

2. Draw a face using the drawing tools. Highlight your drawing and turn it into a symbol called something like face. This should look something like this,

CS3 Screenshot

3. Double click on the symbol to bring up the Symbol Editing Window. You know when you have done this correctly because the name of the symbol appears beneath the timeline.

CS3 Screenshot

4. Add a keyframe (not blank) and, using the first selection tool, move the mouth a little way towards a smile. Keep adding keyframes and moving the mouth a little further until you have a full smile. This is called frame-by-frame animation.

CS3 Screenshot

5. When you have finished, click on the words Scene 1 to return to the main timeline.

Even if you have only one frame on the main timeline with this symbol on it, the face will smile.

6. Your last job would be to deal with how the face moves back from smiling to the starting position so that the animation doesn't look so jerky.