If you want to make an animation with a little more pizazz, you will need to take a slightly more active role in the process. Below are a few of the tools and features Fireworks makes available for creating more complex animations.
Tweening is the process by which an animation program fills in the
steps between two instances of a symbol in the document. In
fireworks, Tweening can be used to make a complex animation (one with
a curve or a color change, for instance).
To use the tweening feature, place two or more instances of a symbol in your document and select them. From the "Modify" menu, choose the "Symbols" submenu and select "Tween Instances...." A pop-up window will ask how many "steps" -- frames between each instance -- you want to use. Once you've decided, click "OK" and you've got an animated image.
When animators used to draw images by hand, they used transluscent
"onion skin" paper so they could see the difference between frames as
they drew. Fireworks allows you to mimic this process by turning on
"onion skinning." Given the digital nature of the image, you are able
to choose whether to view the frames before and after (as with the
image to the right), just the frame before, or even all frames.
To turn on Onion Skinning, click the Frames tab of the Layers
window. Click the "onion skinning" button ( 
) to adjust the settings.