Free Flash Tutorial - Frames, keyframes and the time line

Traditional object animation involves making a series of drawings in which the object position, orientation or shape is changed a little from the previous arrangement. Displaying these drawings one after the other to give a semblance of object animation.

Flash utilizes a similar technique. Each frame represents a single drawing. The time line marker moves from the left to the right (there is no backward motion in Flash) displaying the frames serially. The advantage of using Flash is that once you set the starting and the ending frames, it creates the animation on its own.
An example of a simple animation is moving an object from the left side to right. For this we would have to specify the starting and the ending position of the object in the first and the last frame, respectively. We can then instruct Flash to create the intervening frames. The two frames at the ends contain important information (starting and ending position of the object, in our case) on the animation and are called keyframes in Flash.

Keyframes can also contain actions that alter the flow of the movie. Keyframes and action are described along with examples in the Advanced Flash Tutorial.

Layers help you organize your work. Placing individual animation on its own layer makes it easy to manage the project. Layers and their various types are discussed in detail in the Advanced Flash Tutorial