March Animation Madness

In honor of March madness and due to the fact that my best efforts to make a Flash button with glowing edges failed miserably, I decided to follow a nice tutorial about doing a simple animation of a basketball in Flash.

If you are wondering what the tutorial I used you can find it here at FlashExplained.com

The cool thing was that the basketball was made using the ellipse tool and some clever use of gradients and parts of other ellipses.

Once you have the basketball made the next step is to select all the ellipses that make up the basketball and choose Modify >> Convert to Symbol and choose movie as object type.
Once we have a movie object it can be animated by adding keyframes to the timeline and by selecting the basketball and moving it with the cursor on the keyframe. Once you have moved the ball to a new position you right click and do a tween which animates difference between the two keyframes.

Once you have animated the bouncing ball you need to work on technique called easing which lets you animate the acceleration of a bouncing ball which makes it look like a real bouncing ball.

Here is what we ended up with.


And before you ask yes this is actually an animated gif, which is one of the outputs available from Flash. I was hoping to make a SWF file but could not find a way to get it to display in a a web browser. I will work on that conundrum as time permits.

Oh and the email button I was working on last week I animated at flashing email icon in the button to make it stand out more. I did the animation with Photoshop as I had not been able to work out the setting for animating it in flash.

Here is what it looks like.