Flash Terms to help you get started

tween - a tween is the group of frames that make up the time between the opening and ending cell of a scene in an animation. The boring part of animation is doing the tweening. The good job is creative animator that creates the opening and closing cells
tweens can be motion (movements ) or shape tweens changes in shape/morphing)

frame - another word for a cell in animation

frame rate - the number of frames per second used to create an animation
- GIF animation is typically 5 fps (frame duration .2s or 1/5s)
- FLASH defaults at 12 FPS but the pros use 24 FPS for really smooth looking animations
- due to the intensive labour required for stickman animation you might want to lower the frame rate

key frame - tweens or single frames of animation start and stop with key frames, therefore you must start a tween with a key frame and end with a key frame
- if you are doing frame by frame animation (stickman!) then each frame is a key frame

transparency - alpha - the change of transparency (think Photoshop) of an object in a tween

colour - tint - the change from one colour to another in a tween

Motion Guide - a line that you draw on the motion guide layer that is used as a pathway for a tweened object to follow ..... for example you might want a balloon to drift off in the balloon in a natural wavering manner rather than in a straight unnatural line.  (Insert Motion Guide)
- the Motion Guide can be made invisible by poking the eye of the layer it resides in
- use the pencil to draw the motion guide and set the line option (lower tools) to smooth for a really smooth line

Timeline - the line across the top of the stage area that shows information regarding frames and their allocated role

File Formats - the production format for FLASH is .fla this is like the .psd (photoShop file extention) and contains all the layers so is very large file size, this file format is created each time you do a simple save
- the working format for flash is .swf this format can be used in your web project you create a
.swf file when you FILE > Publish

Library - you can import images sounds and tweens to your projects library by
 FILE > import to library  ...... once in the library assets can be used over and over by dragging them from the library to a new layer on the stage (for example if you want to create a school of fish create just one and then use it over and over until your school is populated with clones .

don't hesitate to ask your teacher when in doubt or think of the question and search for the answer in GOOGLE