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Creating a small Flash Tween and embedding it into a PowerPoint Class Presentation

© Anne Kellerman

It was time to talk about and demonstrate multimedia tools for my multimedia class. What I wanted to do was to develop an example of tweening for the class using Macromedia's Flash MX since it is the tweening that is a key part of the magic that makes Flash so popular. Flash generates intermediate frames between two frames that you supply for you so you do not have to provide them as in Flash tweens. I, then, wanted to go back to a PowerPoint presentation which covered a framework for understanding tools and embed the resultant Flash file. Doing these steps for the class would cover a lot of important points about tools from actually performing the Flash tween to export formats and then how to embed one tool's output into another tool, namely Microsoft PowerPoint.

While once you know how, all of the above is very easy, but there are a few things that you have to scratch your head and wonder how could tools developers make it so obscure.

First, lets talk about the Flash tweening. The idea is to establish a starting picture on a keyframe at lets say frame one and an ending keyframe, frame 20. Then you allow Flash to tween the inbetween frames between frame one and 20. OK, get into Flash and start a new file. You can if desired, go to properties and change the size of your frames and background color to be what you want them to be.

Now place your cursor on frame one. Select the ellipse tool and draw an ellipse. Fill this ellipse with a gradient color by first selecting the color and then choosing a gradient. Select the paint bucket and click in the ellipse which will now be filled with the gradient color. We remind the students that this is similar to what you would do in an image editor. Then that your cursor to frame 20 and go under the insert menu item and select insert a key frame. But you are not done here. Now select the ellipse with the arrow tool and erase the ellipse by hitting the delete key. You now need to create the ending image on this now empty keyframe. We write a set of words like "practice practice". Select these words and modify the font and font size to suit your pleasure here. Then under the modify menu item with the words still selected select break apart not just once but twice. Go back to frame one and go to properties and change the tween from none to shape. Watch for an arrow connecting the two key frames. If you do not get this arrow, start all over again. Try it out. Under the file menu item name and export movie as a swf file. Assume we named it fun.swf.

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