Special Edition Using® Macromedia® Studio 8

Chapter 10. Animation Basics

In this chapter

• Preparing Your Content for Animation 210

• Understanding Symbols 210

• Creating Master Symbols 213

• Editing Master Symbols 217

• Symbol Instances 218

• Animating in Flash 222

• Timeline Effects 229

• Troubleshooting 230

• Best Practices—Planning Your Content and Animation 231

Preparing Your Content For Animation

Previous chapters have covered the Flash interface and all the building blocks that you can use in Flash. Now it’s time to look at one of the most fundamental skills you need to work in Flash: animating on the timeline.

Before jumping into the specifics of animating, this chapter explores ways that you can prepare your content so that when you start animating you’ll create small files and clean animations. The file size ...