Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Creating Web Animations
When you go online and land on a web page, any animations on the page attract your
attention. This is reason enough to dig into the animation features in Xara Xtreme; the
Web is one big marketplace today, and those who don't provide the latest type of content lose to
more glamorous sites. But a
bigger
reason to become proficient with the Frame Gallery and other
animation features is that as a designer, you don't have to limit yourself to blinking buttons—
once you've mastered Xara's drawing tools, you can put
your artwork
into motion. This chapter
takes you through how to animate vector art; how the qualities of timing, concept, and mini-
story-telling add a dimension to drawings; and how to export your moving pictures to GIF and
Flash Shockwave file formats.
Download and extract the contents of Chapter10.zip, which contains everything you need
to work through this chapter's tutorial steps. Additionally, there are Flash files and the Xara
documents used to build them included in the archive. They are simply for you to check out and
analyze. Although the techniques for creating these animations are covered in this chapter, there are no
tutorial steps for them.
Understanding the Capabilities (and Limits)
of Web Animation
Xara animation features produce small gems; Xara Xtreme is not a nonlinear video editing suite,
and it's not Adobe Flash. However, if you get your head and creative skills around drawing and
editing something on a page in Xara, chances are excellent that you can then
animate
it. Animated
GIF files are a piece of cake to produce once you understand how Xara handles bitmaps,
references images, and defines durations. The sections to follow explain a little about the nature of
animation and what transformations are valid to export to the Flash SWF (Shockwave) file format.
Remember that Xara's implementation of Flash is strictly for animation; Xara is a
drawing
program that can help you create animations. It does not support Flash features such as audio,
embedded movies, and scripting for interactivity.
