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As you're using TimelineMax, there's no need to use a function to have a back and forth repeat. I only used that because I assumed you wanted to trigger a reverse when something else happened. Nesting timelines is the way to go. You will be able to create crazy complicated sequences without losing your mind and ending up with 5 kilos of spaghetti. If you feel you can handle moar awesomeness: https://medium.com/net-magazine/7-hidden-gems-of-the-greensock-animation-platform-4fb71389f6ca Well, if the two of you are on first-name terms, surely you can sweet talk her into understanding the value of some charity.

Outstanding post, Craig! I'm new to the Greensock world (just asked my second question this afternoon ha) and reading through your story has inspired me to learn Javascript via GSAP. It's ironic, as I was driving home from work this evening, I thought to myself "this GSAP thing could really help me learn Javascript as a whole". You're right, it's actually fun learning this way. Greensock is simply amazing. I've already had wonderful experiences with @Carl and @mikel. Seems like a great little community and I'm happy to be a part of it We have a lot of similarities, just from reading through your post. I'd like to thank you for writing this and know that it has inspired me (and probably a lot more) to continue down this scary path. -Shawn

A GSAP tale: One goofy guy’s odyssey from knowing nothing to knowing just enough to confuse himself. (This is crazy long so feel free to jump to the epic conclusion). Greetings fellow GreenSockers. The end of this week marks the one-year anniversary of my first post on the forum so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share my 12-month story and hopefully encourage others to jump into the conversations around here. Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in some of the things I’ve experienced. My quick history in a nutshell Web design and coding is a second career for me. After 15 years of owning and operating a photography studio and processing lab (back in the film days - yup - I’m old), the digital camera came along and changed that industry, which necessitated a new career for me. I shifted to video production, which led to motion graphics and finally to web design. Our little agency now offers all those services. The web design clients never needed anything fancy so JavaScript took a back seat to HTML & CSS only sites for a number of years. JavaScript & GSAP: false starts and other obligations I first discovered GSAP a few years ago, but only tried it briefly. It looked cool, but with the time obligations of field video work and motion graphics jobs, it wasn’t something I could work into the schedule. Besides that, it was JavaScript – too complicated I thought. I knew JavaScript was the third piece of a good web designer’s skillset along with HTML and CSS, but I always convinced myself that I didn’t have the time and the sites we built didn’t need it. JavaScript Books + Classes = Fail I did make a few attempts at reading some JavaScript books and working through some online tutorials, but it just never ‘stuck’. Maybe the examples were too theoretical and dry or they were the wrong books and classes. I really don’t know, but I abandoned the learning process a number of times. Cut and Paste mentality Why did I really need to learn anyway? You can just Google what you need, cut and paste some code and presto – you’ve got some working JavaScript or jQuery. I only understood a small portion of what I was cutting and pasting, but hey… it worked so the problem was solved. That’s how I operated for quite some time. What’s a loop? What’s an array? What’s an object? Who cares? Wait a minute. This is ridiculous. Last spring, I was remodeling our company website and I had all these grand visions about making things move and behave in certain ways. Googling for code just wasn’t cutting it. I suddenly felt stupid. “This is ridiculous!” I thought. I should be able to learn how to write my own code. Oh yeah, I remembered that GreenSock thing I had looked at a few times and abandoned. That might work. Maybe I could actually learn how to use it this time. I become a forum lurker I started lurking in the shadows of the forum. After reading a lot of posts, I saw people asking many types of questions from simple to crazy complicated (at least to me). Two things I noticed were that every effort was made to find an answer (no matter the difficulty level of the question) and not one post was condescending or snarky. That’s quite rare on the ol’ interwebs, isn’t it? Hmmmm…maybe I’m in the right place. Oh boy… time to ask a question of my own One of the great things about learning GSAP is you’ll also pick up a lot of other JavaScript and/or jQuery along the way. I kept reading and practicing with some simple tweens, but now I had a question. Dare I post? I suppose, like many others, I feared looking like an idiot even though the forum members and moderators seemed quite nice and helpful. I do several dumb things every day so you’d think I’d be used to it by now. Oh well, here goes. My first question had to do with the indexOf() a Draggable snap array. Within 30 minutes, Diaco and Rodrigo had posted great answers and neither one called me stupid! Yay – how cool. I get hooked on GSAP and the forum About that same time, I decided our company should discontinue on-site video production and switch to studio only filming. I got tired of lugging loads of video gear in and out of buildings – it’s quite tiring and as I mentioned earlier – I’m old. This freed up some time and I decided to dedicate that time to learning GSAP and maybe, one day, even helping others. It wasn’t too long and I actually knew the answer to a forum question. I posted some information and wow – a little red indicator lit up on my control panel. Someone liked something I wrote. How fun – I’m hooked. Carl makes direct contact I continued to learn and experiment. I posted a few additional questions of my own, but I tried to answer more than I asked. If someone posted a question for which I had no answer, I tried to look it up in the docs and figure it out. Most of the time I was far too slow and Jack, Carl or one of the mods would already have the answer posted before I was done reading the question, but it was an interesting way to learn. I did sneak in a few good answers, which led to a private message from Carl. He thanked me for participating and helping in the forums. I thought it was pretty cool that a super smart guy like Professor Schooff would take the time to do that for little ol’ me. My decision to dedicate time to the platform and forum was reinforced. http://i.imgur.com/hdaB73Y.jpg Blake and I have a conversation I don’t recall if it was a back and forth in a forum post or a private message conversation, but Blake told me something that, of course is obvious, but it stuck with me and is important for all of us to remember. He mentioned that we all enter this learning process knowing nothing. If someone of Blake’s considerable skill level can be humble enough to remember first starting out in code, there may be hope for me after all. I guess if you think about it, there was a time when the simple concept of a variable was brand new to all of us. We’re not born with these abilities. They’re learned and we’re all at different points on the educational path. Never feel stupid for not knowing something. Moderator Promotion Throughout the last year, I’ve continued to learn and study both GSAP and JavaScript. Some of those books I abandoned in the past even make sense now. I’ve tried to be active in the GS community and answer as many forum questions as possible. If I’ve answered a question of yours, I hope you found it somewhat helpful. I’ve cranked out some fun CodePens and finally started a Twitter account to tweet them out. I am nowhere near an expert with GSAP or JavaScript, but I know so much more than I knew a year ago. Apparently I know enough to be entrusted with a forum promotion to Moderator status. I’m honored to be included on such an amazing team. 12 months down – what’s next? My agency duties are still numerous so I can’t dedicate full time to coding, but it remains something to which I’m committed and thoroughly enjoy. I started this 12-month GSAP journey just wanting the ability to write my own code rather than cutting and pasting the work of others. I’m confident I have achieved that, but I still have days when a simple piece of code just won’t coalesce in my brain and that can be frustrating. I guess we all have those days, right? I make several mistakes every day, but that’s o.k. too. I learn a lot more from my screw-ups than I ever do when it all goes right on the first try. I plan to keep learning and getting better and when I get stuck, I’ll be able to get an answer from this amazing community. I’ll continue to give back to the GS community by answering any questions that are within my abilities to do so. The super mods: Jonathan, Blake, Diaco and Rodrigo Thank you to my fellow moderators. You guys rock and have taught me so much. @Jonathan – if there is a browser bug, quirk or special fix that you are not aware of, I’ve yet to read about it. Your knowledge has helped me fix many pieces of code before they even became a problem. Plus, if I ever have a question of top/left vs. x/y, I know who I’ll ask. @Blake – if I could be half as good at coding as you, I’d be a very happy guy. Your work always teaches and inspires me. I don’t think you’re allowed to ever stop posting on the forum or we may all show up on your doorstep and ask questions. @Diaco – your code is always so concise. I deconstruct some of your pens and am astounded by how much you squeeze out of a few lines. If I made some of your pens from scratch, I’d have 20 variables, 5 loops, 12 tweens and 80 lines of code. You do the same with two variables and 4 lines of code. Amazing stuff. @Rodrigo – when searching the forum, I often land on one of your past posts and learn a lot. Your knowledge is vast and I wish you had more time to post around here. Your ninja skills are incredibly strong. Our superhero leaders @Carl – I’ve participated in several online forums ranging from graphic design to 3D to video production, but the GreenSock forum is the best and a big part of that is you. You not only provide great answers, but you do it in clever ways with just the right amount of humor thrown in here and there. The collection of videos you’ve made is invaluable and should be mandatory viewing for anyone interested in GSAP. I’ve seen you monitoring the forums at all hours of the day and even on weekends. When you get any sleep I’ll never know, but I thank you for your dedication and sharing your knowledge. @Jack – how you had the vision to start GreenSock and write the first version of the animation platform I can only imagine. I’m glad you did because GSAP is such an amazing collection of tools. The friendliness of the community is definitely following your lead. I don’t understand a lot of what you talk about sometimes, but I know enough to be amazed by your brilliance and talent. You call yourself just a guy who geeks out about code, but you’re more than that. You’re a smart and generous innovator who’s created a special brand and place on the web. I think I can safely speak for the community when I say we all appreciate the time and effort you put into helping us make beautiful and high-performance animations. Thank you sir. The epic conclusion. Well… maybe just a regular conclusion. If you didn’t read the whole post, I don’t blame you. It’s ridiculously long and I’m just some guy you don’t know so I’ll wrap it up with this bit of advice. Whether you’re a genius or feel like an idiot, it doesn’t matter. Try to learn one new thing each day and before you know it, a year will have passed and all those little bits will add up to new skills and abilities. If you’ve never posted on the forum, please jump in and participate. The more voices we have around here, the more we all benefit. If you need an answer, please don’t be afraid to ask a question. Believe me, I’m just some goofy guy in front of a computer. If I can learn this stuff, so can you. As I begin my second year in GreenSockLand, I’m looking forward to learning more, seeing everyone’s work and answering as many of your questions as I can. This is an amazing community and I encourage anyone reading this to set up an account and get involved. My best to all of my fellow GreenSockers. See you around the forums. Edit and Update (July 2020): I just made it to five years of hanging around the forum and you can read the continuation of my journey here. motiontricks.com Finally, without further ado, I introduce you to motiontricks.com - Craig (PointC) PS I made a little CodePen to commemorate my one-year forum anniversary. It’s how I felt before and after discovering the power of GSAP. Enjoy.

Do you mean that when you press "go back" on your browser, the current page stays visible and animates back to what was shown before? If that's the case, you need to use functionality that's beyond the scope of GSAP to intercept the browser's 'go back' behaviour. You should have a look at this page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API and potentially History.js which is no longer maintained but could still be useful. Once you successfully detect that the user is trying to go back and prevent the default browser behaviour of actually reloading the previous page, then you can look into how to reverse your timelines to make your website 'smoothly' go back to the state it was in before.

Think of the tweenFromTo() stuff like instructions to move a needle on a record (music). It wouldn't make sense to write the code the way you did because you've got an overlap of 5 seconds where two hands are fighting for control of the needle's position, telling it to go to completely different places. So on a single tick, one tween says "render that timeline at 0.25 seconds" and immediately after that (literally on the same tick), the other one says "render that timeline at 5.25 seconds". Whichever one runs last would win, but it's just a bad idea to structure things like that (in my opinion). See what I mean?

Let me take this piece-by-piece.... It doesn't become something else (complex tween), no. But it's correct that a child can't exist inside or multiple parents at the same time. Just like a DOM node. Remember, an animation's playhead is always controlled by (and synchronized with) its parent timeline's playhead. tweenFromTo() doesn't copy anything anywhere - it simply creates a tween that literally animates the "time" value of that timeline. That's it. So if you put 100 tweens into a timeline that do all kinds of movements and rotations or whatever, and then you call tweenFromTo() on that timeline, all of that animation data still only resides in that original timeline - there's just a single tween that gets returned that literally animates one property - the "time" - of that timeline. Sounds about right. There's a fantastic article about this technique at https://css-tricks.com/writing-smarter-animation-code/ (I'd highly recommend reading it). Yes, that's correct. This technique is fine in some cases, but keep in mind that you won't be able to scrub the timeline forward/backward if you structure things this way. You're just triggering actions that fire off animations that aren't embedded in a parent that'd make it possible to control them all as a whole. Again, that's perfectly fine in some cases - I just wanted to make sure you understood the tradeoff. I wouldn't say there's one way that the "right" or recommended way. It all depends on your goals. Also keep in mind that when a tween renders the very first time, that's when it records its start/end values internally. So if your SVG face starts normal and you build one "wink left" animation, and one "wink right" animation which will run based on the click of a button, think about how you want the animation to work - if each animation starts from the "normal" state and you're reusing the exact same timelines and just playing/reversing them on button clicks, imagine what'll happen if the user clicks the "wink left" button and halfway through that animation, they click the "wink right" button. In my opinion, the most natural thing would be to create a new tween/timeline that animates it from the current (partially winked) state to the next state rather than robotically jumping back to "normal" and animating from there. But if your goal is to always maintain exactly the same starting/ending states, it's wise to always reuse the same timeline (and/or animate its playhead via the tweenFromTo() method). Does that help?

Hi @fencepencil, Take a look at these remarks: Understanding the Position Parameter (here). Your code line 6 and line 8 looks like you want a yoyo-effect ('yoyo: true') - maybe like this: TweenLite.set(".circle", {transformOrigin: 'center'}); TweenLite.set(".circle-tail", {transformOrigin: '100% 50%'}); var tl = new TimelineMax({repeat:-1, yoyo:true}) .fromTo(".circle", .4, {scale:0.8}, {scale:1.3},0) .fromTo(".circle-tail", 4, {rotation: 7}, {rotation: -7},0) Or every tween for themselves: TweenLite.set(".circle", {transformOrigin: 'center'}); TweenLite.set(".circle-tail", {transformOrigin: '100% 50%'}); var tl = new TimelineMax() .fromTo(".circle", .4, {scale:0.8}, {scale:1.3, repeat:-1, yoyo:true},0) .fromTo(".circle-tail", 4, {rotation: 7}, {rotation: -7, repeat:-1, yoyo:true},0) Happy tweening ... Mikel

I believe to call your function you would want to use onComplete or in the case of a staggeroTo I think its onCompleteAll in the tween, OR use onComplete on the timeline. In your case I think you would want it on the timeline(s). var tl = new TimelineLite({onComplete:allDone}) ; or tl.staggerFrom(chars, 1.2, {onCompleteAll:allDone, opacity:0, scale:0, y:120, rotationX:180, transformOrigin:"0% 50% -50", ease:Back.easeOut, delay:9.8}, 0.01, "+=0");

No, I mean when solving the problems, start with simple questions to decide how to approach your problem. It will help you build your logic a lot easier.