Animating a Ball in Flash and Using Squash and Stretch Techniques

1. Open Flash and create a new flash document..
2. Create a ball with the oval tool and change its color to one of the 3d shaded colors.
3. Select the entire ball with the selector tool.
4. With it selected go to modify then convert to symbol.
5. A menu will pop up save name it ball and select the graphic option.
6. Place the ball on the left side of the screen. This is where your ball will come into the scene like it was thrown, so place it accordingly.
7. Now click in the timeline on frame five.
8. Go to insert then timeline then insert keyframe.
9. Now on frame five move the ball to the bottom and center it in the scene. This is where your ball ends up after it is dropped.
10. Click on frame 12. Select insert then timeline then insert keyframe.
11. Move your ball to the right edge of the scene. This is where are ball will end up after it bounces off the floor and out of the scene.
12. At this point you should save your file as ball.fla.
13. If you move through the timeline you can see that the ball only appears at the keyframes or the tree points we set up. We need to animate the inbetweens.
14. Click the first frame.
15. With the first frame still selected hold down shift and select the last frame. All the frames should now be highlighted.
16. Go to insert then timeline then create motion tween If it worked there should now be arrows in between the keyframes If you play the scene or scroll through the timeline it will look much smoother.
17. To play the movie go to window toolbars and controllor. A pallete will pop up with a play button and stop button as well as other usefull buttons.

Tweaks to make animation look better

1. Click on frame 5in the timeline. Hold down alt and drag over to frame six. Your keyframe on frame 5 is now copied to frame 6.

2. On frame six select the ball.

3. Control click or right click on the ball and select free transform.

4. We want the ball to flatten a little bit when it hits the ground to show that there is some kind of gravity and that it is hitting something solid so distort the ball a little with the free transform tool.

5. Since it is distorted it may have moved off from the floor so move it down so that the bottom of the ball is touching the ground.

6. Now when you play the animation it will look like a rubber ball bouncing.

7. Save the file.