Frame by frame

Frame by frame is very similar to motion tweening but much more manual. Essentially you have to draw both keyframes and make the transition yourself. The advantage of frame by frame over motion tweening is that you are not as limited in how much you want to change your object. Also, you do not have to convert it to a symbol so your library will not be as clustered.

Similarly to motion tweening, draw your first keyframe. Whenever the drawing changes direction you add a keyframe. In this case we will need 3 keyframes:

When you playback (by pressing enter/ return), it should look similar as in the timing, but not necessarily similar in that you drew the same thing.

Remember: Timing between the keyframes is very important.Now we have to draw the inbetweeners. Insert a blank keyframe in between your two keyframes, make sure onion skinning is turned on and draw in between the two keys. The keyframe you drew in between the two keys are called inbetweeners.

If you want it to accelerate, you have to move the inbetweener two the left and insert another blank keyframe and repeat the process.

You can keep repeating this process until you think the transition is smooth enough. Each time you have a new keyframe, you must create the transition manually by inbetweening. This style of animating is called frame by frame because you have to animate each frame for the transitions. Here’s the final product:

                                                                                                                                  
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