3 steps

1. STEP 1 · OPEN THE REELClick MOTION on the right-hand rail. Put the pieces you want to animate on the sheet first · cut paper, letters, shapes, anything. Nothing here copies them per frame: there is one set of pieces the whole way through, and what you are writing down is where they stand.
2. STEP 2 · TURN THE FLIPBOOK ONIn the motion panel open THE CLOCK and tick Flipbook · shoot pose by pose. The record light comes on, the ghosts come on, and every pose you write from here holds instead of travelling · a plate cuts to the next pose rather than sliding to it. Choose how fast the book runs · 8, 12 or 24 a second · and whether each pose stands for one frame or two.
3. STEP 3 · MOVE, SHOOT, MOVE, SHOOTMove a piece with your hand, then press ▣ Shoot on the strip · or S. The pose stands where you put it and the clock steps one frame; shoot again with nothing moved and the piece simply holds another frame, which is a thing every animator does on purpose. The ghosts show the pose before and the pose after, so you can register the next one against them. The shot grows a frame at a time as you go, and nothing already shot ever moves. **And you can edit it as frames.** The ⋯ beside ▣ Shoot holds four verbs: Again writes this frame a second time and moves everything after it along, Drop takes it out and closes the gap, Hold makes the pose stand one frame longer, and Reverse runs the whole shot backwards. D, H and ⌫ do the first three from the keyboard, and one ⌘Z takes any of them back whole.

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