If you’ve ever seen an animation or any kind of interactive content on the web (which, if you have internet access, is pretty much a given, let’s be honest), chances are it was made in Flash. Want to get started making your own and just haven’t got a clue where to start? Well, here’s a bunch of things you’ll probably need to know before you even think about beginning…

So, what exactly as Flash? To give it it’s full title, Adobe Flash is the program in which all these things can be made.

The latest version is CS4, which can be used to create, animations, games, and other web applications. Animations can either be produced frame by frame, by using the inbuilt timeline feature, or scripted using Action Script – Flash’s own unique programming language. Users can draw their desired content straight into the program with the brush or pen tool, or import images from file.

Objects can also be animated via ‘tweening’, which is less time consuming than frame by frame.

But as you might expect, there’s a lot of terminology unique to this software that can be bewildering unless you’re in the know. With that in mind, here’s a list of some of the most common ones to help you out…

.fla : This is the extension for a source file which can only be opened/read by Flash. This is how an animation/game/etc will be saved until you are finished and ready to publish it.

.swf : This is the extension of the file that is created after you publish your finished work so that it can be embedded on the web and viewed by other applications.

Action Script: Flash’s unique programming language

Frame rate: FPS (or ‘frames per second’) is the rate at which your animation plays. Flash’s standard FPS is set to 12. The faster you’re frame rate is, the more fluid and smooth your animation will appear, however, too fast a frame rate will have the opposite of the desired effect.

Frames: The time line is made of these, and the order in which they are arranged in Flash will be the order in which they will be displayed in your animation.

Keyframe: A keyframe is a frame in which you change something in your animation. Motion tweens automatically fill in the frames between key frames to produce a fluid result.

Layers: These help you organise all the art in your animation and work much the same as layers do in any other graphics program. It’s best to think of them as transparent sheets set on top of each other.

Library: This is where imported files (such as sound files, video clips), movie clips and other symbols are stored within your Flash document.

Stage: This is effectively your canvas, and where you are going to place all your graphical content. Size and background colour canbe changed using the ‘Property inspector’ button.

Symbols: A graphic, movie clip or button that you can create which will automatically be added to your library. This allows you to reuse it throughout your document.

Timeline: Located at the very top, the timeline enables you to control your documents content by use of frames.

Tweening: Tweened animation often runs a lot smoother, and is an easy way to produce changes over a set period of time, whilst reducing the file size, as well because Flash only stores the values for the keyframes for this process. You are able to define size, rotation and position using tweening. There are two types: shape, and motion tweening. Shape tweening obviously deals with morphing the shape of an object over a set time period, and motion tweening, with the movement of objects.