How To Add Adobe Animate CC To InDesign CC Files

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at how to put in animations that you've created in Adobe Animate CC, and bring them into InDesign, then publish them through our Publish Online option. Sounds complicated, it's not, just animations in InDesign. All right, let's go and learn how to make that happen now in InDesign.

First thing we need to do is, let's create a blank page for it to be on. I'm on page 7, new page. So I've got a blank page, we're going to bring in our Animate CC animation. We've got a file ready to go. So in your 'Exercise Files', in your folder called '04 Interactive', there's a folder called 'Animate CC', open up the 'Elephant.fla'. That will open up the project in Adobe Animate. So this is not going to be how to make animations in Adobe Animate. I've got a full course on how to do this, of course, I do. This is me trying to cross sell it to you. So go check it out, and you can do it for animations for banner ads, for e-learning because you can only do real basic animations in InDesign. Remember, our kind of like, sliding from the top, and sliding from the left, whereas Animate, you can make fully interactive, fully immersive animations.

I've got this file here, it's already been animated, I'll preview it. Here he is, walking along. So we've got our animation, what we really want to do is we want to be able to export this in the right format. So back into Animate CC, in Animate CC, what you want to do, is go to 'File', we want to go to 'Publish Settings', and there's kind of two things we want to do. We want to turn on this one called 'OAM Package'. That is the file we're going to need to work into InDesign. The exact same file format works when you go into Adobe Muse as well. So if you're doing animations and you want to go into your web project using Muse, use the same format.

The other thing you need to change is, up here, where it says 'JavaScript/HTML', we need a couple of things on, turn 'Loop Timeline' on, because we want this elephantine one through and loop, and I think that's on by default. The thing that's not on by default is this one here, it says 'Make Responsive', 'Both'. It just means that when we scale it in InDesign it's actually going to scale properly otherwise it just won't scale. So make sure, 'Loop' and 'Make Responsive' both is turned on, then click this button, 'Publish', not 'OK'. Click on this very important 'Publish' button. Once that's done, you get to click on 'OK'.

Let's see the file that's been created. So here in my file, that's the file that got generated. I've got it here for you in your exercise files. You don't have to go and do it, but that's the one we want. So back into InDesign. Here in InDesign, just go to 'File', 'Place', find that same folder, find that 'oam' file format. Click 'Open', and you can place him in. Let's preview it here in our EPUB. And there is our little walking elephant. I'll close it down. Now, we've done our walking elephant, it's one of the defaults from Animate. It's not obviously communicating anything useful for our Furniture Place. So what you want to do is, think e-learning, think communicating kind of ideas through animation rather than just trying to expand the text. It could be some sort of animation that kind of helps communicate how maybe furniture goes together.

You'll have your own ideas for your particular project. So go out, do a bit of Animate CC. If you've done Flash in the past, it's exactly the same as Flash, they've just renamed it but it works perfectly through Publish Online and EPUB. All you need to do is export it as that oam option. All right, that's it, let's jump into the next video.