Creating a Simple Flash Animation

This tip explains how to setup a simple Flash animation using blends in a FreeHand document.

Version: 8 and above

For this example I've created 4 basic shapes that will be blended together and later, turned into a Flash™ animation. These shapes can be anything, even text, just as long as they can be blended together. Since the shapes are going to blend into one another starting at the circle and ending at the circle, I need to Clone the circle and just leave it there.

Next, I select all of the objects and apply the Blend command. This blends all the shapes into each other without having to blend them one at a time (very cool). Here I chose 10 steps for the blend, because the resulting Flash file gets bigger with more steps.

Now while the blended shapes are still selected, choose Xtras -> Animate -> Release to Layers. This will take every shape in the blend and put it on a separate layer for you. Here I have about 43 new layers created from this step. Don't put them on one layer, just leave it alone. For FreeHand 9 and above, you can choose different ways of releasing the objects to layers. For this sample, use the Sequence option.

Next, Export the file under the File menu. In the pulldown menu, select Flash SWF as the file format. Before you save, click on the Options button. You'll see a dialog like above (v8 shown). Make sure the option Animate layers is turned on then click OK.

Now in Flash, when you import or open the file you've exported, you'll see that all the frames are filled with the blended steps you created. Here you can optimize the file even further since FreeHand doesn't compress the Flash movies very well.

Here is the final Flash movie after compressing and optimizing in Flash.

Since Flash 2 can't blend shapes, this is a good way to do it from FreeHand. You can also create a Flash animation using other methods, such as animating the pages in your document or other layers you may have. The newer versions of Flash now let you do things like blending shapes and text together, so give it a try it's pretty cool.