With the clock, I used a rotation with a Step parameter for the second hand, to loop a time looped animation of the second hand “bouncing”. This was much better than the Macromedia Flash way of working where I had to copy and paste a group of 25 frames over and over again.
For the house I used a zoom layer and a translate layer to move the house and key around. Often in Flash I had to shrink my graphics by 50% so I was able to zoom in enough on them, but with Synfig Studio I don’t have to bother with any of that.
One thing I didn’t realise at first was that if I am using a transform or zoom layer I don’t need to bother changing the Origin of my vector shapes to be in the centre as I’m not using that origin anyway.
Many thanks! I’m feeling a bit silly at the moment as I created a lovely noise PNG in The GIMP to fade the door and logo on the house (due to the method used to remove them on the original film these don’t fade cleanly, they fade unevenly). However, I’ve just realised I could have used a Synfig Studio Noise Gradient and not bothered importing an external PNG at all.
And then I also realised I could have added a shadow to the second hand using a Shade layer. At least I managed to work out I could make the door knocker move easily using a Stretch layer!
I really should spend more time working out how I can use all the different layers!
