As many know - Flash Macromedia is en vogue these days and you can actually do some pretty cool stuff with it. I'm going to do a couple of simple tutorials to get those people started using flash. Once you start to use it and get some of the basic concepts, you can do some cool simple animation for your websites or whatever.

Tutorial 1: Simple Motion Tweening

Motion tweening is basically a quick way to animate something.

1. First you need to draw an object on the screen (you can also import a graphic or something too). Make sure you get the graphic or drawing on the work area in the center of the screen. (just simply selecting the circle tool and drawing one on the canvas will work fine).

2. Once you have created a basic image to tween you must convert it to a SYMBOL so that it may be animated. Right click your picture or circle or whatever and select convert to symbol from the menu. Choose graphic from the 3 types of symbols. This is a CRITICAL STEP if you forget this your tweening will NOT WORK!

3. On the timeline (top of screen) - click several frames in advance maybe frame 24 (2 sec @12frames/sec) right click and go to insert keyframe. A dot should appear in the selected frame.

4.Now move the SYMBOL you've drawn somewhere else on the canvas. (preferable far enough away so that when you apply the tweening, you see noticable movement not 1mm movement)

5. Now the object is ready to be tweened. Click the first frame of the flash doc. (it should also have a dot in the frame). Right click the frame and click 'motion tween'. The frames in between the dots should turn blue and a line with an arrow should appear - meaning the object was tweened.

6. If the line appears dashed, something is wrong - go back and start over and repeat the steps above.

7. Preview your flash movie and watch the animation.