Table of Contents - Serif

Working with Keyframe animation
Creating Animations 211
When compared with Stopframe animation (see Getting started with animation
on p. 205), Keyframe animation offers a more powerful and efficient animation
technology—it saves having to declare every frame, letting your computer do the
hard work! Essentially, the technique lets you create only user-defined
keyframes through which objects animate, with each keyframe containing Key
objects which can be assigned a position, rotation, attributes, etc.
Intermediate steps between Key objects are created automatically and produce a
smooth professional-looking inter-object transition (this is called Tweening);
Tweened objects are created as a result. You won't see these intermediate steps
showing tweened objects by default, but they exist transparently between key
objects throughout your animation.
The Storyboard tab is the workspace for laying out your animation "story" in a
chronological keyframe-by-keyframe sequence (from left to right). On export,
your animation will play in this direction. Using the above "bee" animation in
the tab illustration as an example, the bee is animated, while the sun and
"Buzzzz" text remain static objects.
By adding objects (bee and sun) to a starting keyframe it's possible to
automatically copy (or more correctly run forward) those objects forward when
you create subsequent keyframes. This in itself doesn't affect animation, but it's
the repositioning of a run forward object (such as the bee) in later keyframes that
creates "movement."
Once keyframes are created, the animator has a great deal of control over how
objects are run forward (or even backwards). You can introduce objects
anywhere on the storyboard (so they appear for a limited time), and either run
them forward or backwards by a specific number of keyframes (or right to the
start or end of the storyboard). The "Buzzzz" text in the above example will only
show from keyframes 3 onwards (i.e., from 6 seconds).