Tech Alive Support

Creating a Module - General: Animation

Embedding a Flash Animation

If you have a Flash (*.swf) animation that was created either in collaboration with Tech Alive or independently, you can embed it in a web page. Do Insert > Flash Movie... and browse to the Flash-type file on your computer. It will be copied and uploaded when you Publish.

It can be resized or copied and pasted like an image. Do F12 to Preview the animation in your default web browser. That browser must have Flash plug-in installed. Your visitors will also need to have Flash plug-in installed on their web browsers. You can include a link to the Tech Alive documentation for visitors: Help with Rich Content: Animation.

Embedding a GIF Animation

You can embed a looping GIF (*.gif) animation into the web page as you would with any other image.

More Information

Visitors and Animation

Looping animations can be annoying or distracting on a web page. Here are some options for making animation engaging rather than annoying:

• Include Pause/Play controls when designing a Flash animation.
• Alert visitors that they can right-click on a Flash animation and uncheck "Play" to halt the main movie timeline. Test this capability yourself. Movie clips inside of Flash may have an independent timeline.
• Make the animation slow-moving.
• Link to the animation as a document, rather than embedding it in the web page. The visitor can view it when they're ready. You can create a screen capture of the animation as a button to link from.

If your animation loops twice or more in one second, it is too fast. This frequency is associated with health concerns and must be avoided. Either edit the animation to slow it down or do not embed it in the web page. Animation playback speeds may vary on different computers.

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