building a slideshow with flash

By Jeremy Rue   ·   Updated Jun 20, 2011   ·   Print Print

Add Frames and Keyframes

Now that we have converted our images into symbols, we can now build out our timeline by adding some frames.

Click once on Frame 44 in the top layer to select it.

Selecting frame 44 in the timeline

Then, while holding down your shift key, and click once on frame 44 in the bottom layer. This will select all of the frames inbetween.

Selecting multiple frames in the Flash timeline

In the Insert menu, select Timeline --> Keyframe.

Menu to insert a keyframe in Flash

Now, select the entire column of frames on frame 10 using the same technique as you did with frame 44. Click once on the top frame of frame 10, hold down shift, then click once on the bottom.

Insert keyframes at frame 10

Insert a keyframe in column 10 as well by going to the Insert menu, and selecting Timeline --> Keyframe.

Repeat this process one more time for frame 35.

After creating all of the frames

Your timeline should look like the timeline above at this point, with keyframes (black dots) at 1, 10, 35 and 44.

What are keyframes?

Keyframes represent change in a particular layer of a timeline. If you can imagine a flip book that animates as you snap the pages with your thumb; each of those pages would be a separate keyframe in Flash, because each page is different. The gray bars simply represent time where nothing is changing.

The reason why we placed keyframes at frames 1 and 10 is this will be the space where the photos fade up. The space between frames 10 and 35 will simply display the image, and frames 35 to 44 will fade out the image.

The small white squares in the timeline are absolutely meaningless. Well, actually they represent the end of a keyframe section, but you can already tell that because there is another keyframe just after it. So just ignore the little white squares.

(Why did we choose frame 44 for the end? While it is not really necessary, it helps us keep the fade segments aligned later on in this tutorial. Because the timeline starts on frame 1 and not on frame 0, using frame 44 will match each fade as 9-frames long by the end of this project.)

Filed under: Flash