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TUTORIALS
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I just spent a week showing instructors how to use the Adobe Web Suite of applications in their classrooms. I was really surprised how few of them were using LiveMotion. Considering most of the interface is similar to After Effects I’m surprised more people aren’t using LiveMotion to create SWF files for the web. In this exercise we’ll create a composition that allows the user to move an object in three different ways.
Begin by launching LiveMotion and creating New Composition (Command+N on the Mac, Control+N on the PC) that is 400 pixels wide by 300 pixels high. Use the default frame rate of 12 for this exercise. Incidentally, for web animation 12fps is quite enough and even corresponds to the frame rate of early Saturday morning cartoons we enjoyed as kids.[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Select a background color (I chose a medium dark green). Use the Paint Bucket Tool and click in the Comp Window to make the background that color.
Change the color to a light yellow and from the Library Palette drag and drop the default star object in the Comp Window.
One of the problems with LiveMotion 2.0 is that when you create a new composition, the program doesn’t open the Timeline automatically. This is something you will have to do yourself, so from the Timeline menu, select Timeline or press Command+T on the Mac or Control+T on the PC.
You will notice that the Timeline is labeled Composition by default. Let’s consider this our Base Composition for this project. You will also notice that star object we just added in is in the Timeline and is listed as Medium_Yellow 01_Star.pdf. This currently is a layer, but we need to make it a Time Independent Group. A Time Independent Group is an animation/movie file that is detached from the Base Composition. If you have an After Effects background you can think of Time Independent Groups as Nest Compositions that can do what they want separate from the Base Comp.
Make sure the Medium_Yellow 01_Star.pdf is selected and at the very bottom left corner of the Timeline Window you will see five icons. The very last one (on the right) will turn any layer (or group of layers) into a Time Independent Group (TIG) and make it a movie clip. Click on this icon and notice the change that the star layer is now called Group of 1 Objects in the Timeline.
This is can potentially be very confusing later in the process so with the Group of 1 Objects layer selected in the Timeline Window, press the Enter key on the keyboard and rename the layer Star Base.
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