Basic Adobe Animate

Adobe animate is a very cool piece of software which allows you to create animations, both simple and advanced, in a very simple and efficient manner. It also works within the adobe universe, so it is very easy to transfer your animations into other adobe programs. Today I will be looking at the very basics of adobe animate, so that if I do plan on testing out animation, I have a starting point to work from.

To begin with, the background/ workspace is called the stage within adobe animate. The timeline can have many different stages and looks, for instance when there is a grey square, it means nothing is within that frame, but when you place down anything inside that frame, on the timeline it will show as blue with a dot inside. The timeline is used in almost the same way as in other adobe programs.

There are 2 types of frame within adobe animate. There are frames, and there are key frames. A key frame is the blue square with a dot in it, and a key frame tells you that there will be a new drawing at that stage, such as a movement or some sort of fragmentation. A frame can be a still image, with no action taking place at these points. Right click on the timeline and select key frame, and now if you alter the pieces within the stage, at the point of the key frame, the alteration of the pieces will occur.

A symbol within Adobe animate is a reusable image, graphic or animation. Symbols reside in the library, and you can alter the alpha/ opacity of symbols.

the shortcuts for moving frames is comma ( , ) to move backwards or full stop ( . ) to move forwards. The technique for animating on twos involves animating on every other frame, to make movements more smooth, unless you want fast movements where you animate in ones. F6 inserts a key frame, and F7 inserts a blank key frame, of which is used for creating animations. Create a blank key frame, draw on it, move forward 2 frames and hit F6 for a new blank key frame, and draw the second part of the animation. To see what the previous frames look like, turn on onion skin layering from the options tab below the stage. When you are at an in between frame, the red shape is the previous frame and the green shape is the next frame. F5 is used to add new frames, of which are used to increase the time between key frames. For basic animation there is a technique called easing, where just say you are animating a bouncing ball, the first points to make are the top point (where the ball is at its highest) The low point (where the ball is at its lowest) and the mid point. Easing would be how you get from frame to frame, by making more key frames of the ball, You draw the next part of the animation, by drawing either the top, mid or low point of the ball, but more towards the other point.

Below the stage, there is an option for looping. Select the looping button, and it should create a blue line. Drag the blue line over the part of the project you want looped, and preview it, to see the loop. There are also other basic tools such as rotation, scaling, positioning and many other tools that at found in other Adobe programs. Below I will post a very basic sequence of a car driving, that I quickly created within adobe animate.