January 26

I have been practicing the "Motion Tween" feature in flash. This is a very helpful tool because it can transform objects or move them across the field without having to painstakingly do it frame by frame. For example, here i have a rainbow ball which transforms into ALEX. I did this by creating the rainbow on the first frame, then i selected frame 35 and drew ALEX. So on frame 1 i have a rainbow ball and frame 35 ALEX with blank frames in between. To transform the rainbow ball into ALEX i simply selected the motion tween option. Motion tweening has a lot of possibilities and i am going to continue experimenting with this.

So far i have conducted research through experimentation. Much of which is trial and error. For instance i have had a lot of trouble with motion and shape tweening. The frame by frame animation I'm used to takes a lot of time so tweening saves a lot of time. However I'm wasting time trying to figure things out.

As you can see tweening creates a more fluid motion than frame by frame drawing. However I'm confused why I have to select shape tween instead of motion tween to make the ball move. The squash and stretch principal isn't utilized because the program gets confused and thinks I want the ball to gradually stretch as it falling to the ground. This isn't what I want of course, I want it to squash and stretch as it hits the ground. You can see the difficulty I'm having first hand. When the ball collides with the ground it bounces back and just looks generally unappealing.