A motion tween is a way of creating automated animations in Flash. You can use a motion tween to move or rotate a Flash object on your stage over a chosen period of time, without having to define the object’s position for every frame of the animation. In this tutorial I show you how to use a motion tween by creating a simple fade in affect of a simple object.

Step 1: Create a new Flash movie with the ActionScript version set to 3.0.

Step 2: Draw a simple object on the screen. Color and size do not matter for this tutorial.

Step 3: Use the Select Tool (V) and select the object. Now Press F8 on your keyword to convert it to a symbol. Set the type to Movie Clip.

Step 4: In the timeline panel, on your layer, click the white empty box under the frame marked 30 and press F5 on your keyboard. This will create 30 frames.

Step 5: Right click your mouse anywhere between frames 1 and 30 and on the popup menu, select Create Motion Tween.

Step 6: The timeline for the layer has turned to cyan color. Now all we need to do is add our fade. To do this, click frame 1 in your timeline for your layer.

Step 7: Click on your object. On your Properties Inspector (viewable by clicking Window-> Properties or CTRL+F3) you will see COLOR EFFECT. Select Alpha for the Style and then set the Alpha slider to 0%. In frame 1 it will make your object look like it has disappeared.

Step 8: Now go to frame 30 and using the step 7, set the alpha for your object to 100%.

That’s it, We are done ! Go through Control>Test Movie to see simple motion tween effect.

Downloads:

Flash CS4: Simple Motion Tween