Have you ever wanted to use Storyline’s entrance and exit animations for more expanded purposes than they were originally intended? For as long as the product has been around, its animation tool functionality has been lacking. Instead of giving designers flexibility over when all of the animations can be used, the software limits the availability of them to entering and exiting.
Accordingly, there are some work-arounds you can use to create a repeated/looping animation effect, say, if you wanted to create a dot that continually fades in and out like a beacon.
To illustrate, in the screenshot below, I wanted the white dots to slowly get brighter and then fade out. I decided that adding a bit of animation here could draw the user’s attention to the next action they should be taking — dragging the orange slider to the next dot.
A challenge you face when using an exit animation is the object you apply the animation effect to is intended to “disappear” from the timeline permanently once the animation is executed. Likewise, the entrance animation only runs at the start of the timeline for the object, so both entrance and exit animations are really made for one-time usage.
Despite the shortcomings the animation tool’s design, Storyline has added some additional functionality to its timeline that helps get around this — a feature called jump to time / jump to cue point. As stated in its name, this feature allows you to set up an interaction where an event causes the timeline to automatically jump the user to a specific location. This feature can be extremely useful for gaining more control over animations on your slide.
Setting Up the Interaction
As mentioned above, setting up the looping animation will require us to use the jump to time/ jump to cue point feature. I will use the slider bar in the aforementioned example to walk you through how to set up the loop. Then, you should be able to apply the general process to other projects or interactions that you work on.
Create the entrance and exit animations
To create a pulsing in and out effect with the dots, I used the fade entrance and exit animations.
Once the fade is set on both exit and entrance animations, you need to decide what speed you want them to fade in and out. In this case, I didn’t want them blinking fast because they would become too distracting while learners were attempting to read the page. Therefore, I decided to go with a pretty slow fade-in and then a more rapid fade-out. I felt it made for a nice rhythmic pulse of the dot.
Adjust the timeline of the animated object.
Creating the Loop
Jump to Time/Cue Point
Set up a trigger so that when the timeline reaches the point where the object(s) finishes their exit animation, the timeline jumps backwards to the point where the object’ enters the timeline. Note: if you have other objects with entrance animations that you don’t also want repeating, drag the looped object a quarter-second or so off of the beginning the timeline so that you don’t trigger those animations as well.
Here is how I looped the example above:
You also set the Jump to time / cue point to trigger when the exit animation completes:
So, hopefully you can find some creative use cases for looping entrance and exit animations in Storyline. I mainly use it for a beacon-like effect, where I am trying to get users to pay attention to an object and interact with it. However, I’m sure other designers have more creative uses for this technique. Good luck as you try this out!
