A Scrolling Background Animation

27th March 2007

« Animation | 1 2 3 4 5 | Introduction »

Part 5 : Faster and Slower

There are some different ways of changing the speed of the animation.

• When creating the animation, tap the Right-Arrow key 4 times for each frame. This will mean making only 10 frames and the animation is twice as fast.

• Similarly, tap the Right-Arrow key only once on each new frame, but make 40 frames. This gives a half-speed animation.

Using your current animation of 20 frames, you can change the timing of frame-display as follows:

• In the Animation window, select frame 1 by clicking on it. Scroll along to the end and select frame 20, holding down the shift key as you click on the frame. This should select all frames 1 - 20 in the window.

• Click on one of the Frame Delay Time arrows to see the timing menu.

• Choose a frame delay time for the whole animation.

Animation before frame delay.

Animation with a 0.2 seconds frame delay.

Too great a frame delay can make the animation jerky. Experiment by choosing Other in the Frame Delay Time options and entering smaller values such as 0.05 seconds.

Note: A delay of 0.03 seconds will cause an error in Firefox and the animation will race along at a very fast rate when displayed in this browser.

One final method to smooth out the animation is to apply a motion blur.

• Select frame 1 in the Animation window. Make sure Propogate Frame 1 is ticked in the Layers Palette.

• Select Filter » Blur » Motion Blur from the menu.

• Apply a horizontal blur of about 5px - 10px : experiment to see what looks good.

Animation with a 5px motion blur.

Happy animating.

« Animation | 1 2 3 4 5 | Introduction »

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