Creating a Shape for Animation

Before we perform any sort of animation, we'll need to create a visual shape to manipulate. Once this shape has been established, we'll perform a specific type of tween that only works with shapes. It will likely come as no surprise to anyone that this type of tween is called a Shape Tween.

Note

The term "tween" is shorthand for "in-between" and is a traditional animator's term, describing the frames that exist in-between the main "key" frames that are drawn by a senior animator. These would be filled in by less-skilled junior animators using the "key" frames as a guide. Tweens in Animate work in much the same way!

Let's now create a shape object to perform a bit of animation with:

1. First, create a new ActionScript 3.0 document and set the width to 1280 and the height to 720, with an FPS setting of 30. You can verify that you've done this correctly from the Properties panel...