Using Adobe animate, we are learning to animate a clock rotation.
First, you need to make your clock using Adobe Illustrator. This is my design.
Ensure that the clock face, small hand and big hand are each on their own separate layer like this and save it as an illustrator file.
Then, open Adobe Animate and select new document. Ensure that you choose ActionScript 3.0 and have it set up with a width of 1920px and height of 1080px. The frame rate should be 24 fps.
After this, your canvas or stage will appear. You’ll then need to go to Insert > New Symbol and a dialogue box will open.
Name the symbol ‘Clock’ and set the type to graphic before pressing ok.
To get your clock into the Animate file, go to File > Import > Import to Stage and locate the Illustrator file of your clock.
After selecting your file, this dialogue box will open. Ensure that the layers with the clock face, small hand and big hand are all selected and that the Convert layers to option is set to animate layers before pressing Import.
Your clock should then appear on the stage and the layers should be in the timeline.
Now, you’ll need to make the big and small hand into symbols. Do this by selecting the hands one at a time before going to Modify > Convert to symbol before naming it appropriately and making sure the type is set to graphic.
After converting them, they should appear in your library as symbols.
Now you’ll need to change the pivot point or centre point of both hands. Select the Free Transform tool (shortcut Q) and find the small white circle that appears on the shape when it is selected.
Move this circle so that it is at the centre of the clock for both of the hands.
Now to add time in which the animation will take place in, go to a little bit past the 2 second mark on the timeline, and select the same frame on each of the layers before right-clicking and selecting Insert Frame.
Your timeline should look like this with all of the frames that you have added.
First, we’re going to animate the small hand. Select the 10th frame on the small hand layer and right-click to select Insert Keyframe. Then, go to Modify > Transform > Rotate 90° CW. Repeat this process for the small hand in 10 frame intervals until you have one full rotation of the hand around the clock.
Now go to the first frame, right-click and select Create Classic Tween. Repeat this step on keyframes 10, 20 and 30.
As the hand is being rotated by exactly 90° each time, the hand will end up back to the start on the 40th frame – making a duplicate of the first frame. For a smooth animation, you need to create a keyframe on the 39th frame before deleting the 40th and all of the other unused frames by selecting them, right-clicking and pressing Remove Frames.
Having the clock as a symbol allows you to animate the clock further. Whilst you have your primary animation (the clock hand moving) happening in the symbol, you can easily animate the whole clock without having to worry about altering the already animated clock hand.
Go back to the main stage, Scene 1, in the crumb trail and drag the clock symbol on to the stage from the library.
Insert frames up to the 78th frame like in the original animation so that there are 2 full cycles when looped. Then, insert keyframes at the 39th and last frame before reducing the size of the clock using the free transform tool at frame 39. Finally, at the first and 39th frame, create a classic tween to make the clock shrink and expand.
You can view the animation by going to Control > Test Movie > In Animate.
I decided to export my animation as a GIF so that you can easily watch it on loop. Go to File > Export > Export Animated GIF.
When these options open up, select GIF 128 Dithered for the name before selecting save.
Here is my GIF:
I feel that the animation turned out well and loops successfully. The next step might be to animate the other hand so that it functions realistically.
Jasmine Cooper 