Question

I’m looking to create an animation loop in Flash. The base character animation I have is 27 frames. However to have the background move at the correct speed, the entire animation is 432 frames.

Since I am making the animation so long anyway, I want the character to blink halfway through the animation loop. I went into the head symbol and extended its animation from a single frame to 432 frames. Halfway through that animation I swap out the image for one that is blinking (3 new images added for the blink).

So, now the symbols are nested like: 432 frames -> 27 frames -> 432 frames

But it doesn’t seem like Flash is smart enough to animate it as I would expect. It only repeats the first 27 frames of the child symbol.

The next thing I tried was extending the 27 frame character animation out to 432 frames. I did this by copy-pasting the character animation 16 times. But this also does not work because copying the keyframes also copies the position of the child animation’s playback. This causes the animation to constantly reset and never reach the blink.

I also tried using the copy motion option, but it didn’t seem to do anything different than copying keyframes.

Is there an easy way to make this animation work? I can’t possibly need to manually position a total of 576 keyframes (there is actually another level to the nesting which does not use any tweens, just keyframes) could I?

Answer 1

I ended up finding a solution to the problem. Turning the head into a Movie Clip made it so the keyframes couldn’t affect the internal animation. The only problems with this method are that

1. Movie Clips will not animate during editing. The only way to see the Movie Clip in action is to run the SWF.
2. The Movie Clip will not pause when your animation is paused. All other motion will stop, but the Movie Clip remains unaffected by the pause action.