1) In a new document, criss-cross a horizontal and vertical Guide.

Select the Ellipse tool, then holding the Option (Alt)+Shift keys, drag out a constrained circle from the intersection of the guides like shown above.

2) Clone this new circle. Then in the Transform palette, Scale the clone about 30% uniformly. You can use other scale amounts if you prefer.

3) Select both circles and Ungroup them. Then under the Xtras menu -> Distort -> Add Points. Or you can use the toolbar button.

You should have both circles looking like the above example so far.

Now, click-drag around both the circles to select all of the Points. Then do the Split command under the Modify menu. This splits the circles into little arcs between the points.

4) Now Shift+select an arc from the larger circle and it's corresponding arc from the inner circle.

Then Join them from the Modify menu. Then in the Object inspector, turn on the Closed option.

Note: you can assign a key command for the Close operation. Go under the File -> Customize -> Shortcuts menu. Then look in the Other section -> Paths -> Close. I use the Command+Shift+C command for this. You can use whatever you like. This makes it much quicker to close open paths instead of going to the palette all the time.

5) Repeat step 4 for the remaining arcs. You should now have a bunch of "pie" shapes like shown above.

6) Now click-drag to select the inner points of the objects. Then in the Transform palette, Rotate the points 45°. You can really use any value you want to for this depending on your needs.

After the rotation, select all the shapes and Group them together. Then go under the Modify Menu and Lock them. After that, Clone the group to make the next transformation.

7) Now hold the Option (Alt) key and click-drag to select the inner points of the objects again. Then in the Transform palette, Scale the points 200%. Again, the value doesn't really matter, you can customize any of these values to experiment with them.

After you Scale the points, you should now see two group of objects like shown above.

8) Select both groups and in the Fill inspector, choose a Gradient fill. Above I simply used Black as the top color and a 40% Tint of that Black for the bottom color.

Now while they are still selected, choose the Unlock command under the Modify menu. This unlocks that group that was locked earlier.

9) Keeping both groups selected, Blend them under the Modify -> Combine menu. You can adjust the number of steps to fit your needs. The more the steps, the slower the final animation will be. I chose to use 25 steps for this example.

10) Now select the Blended objects and bring up the Release to Layers dialog either with the toolbar button or go under the Xtras menu -> Animate.

Here, choose the Sequence option and turn on the Use existing layers option.

When you hit OK, you'll get a whole bunch of layers ready to export as a Flash SWF file. In FreeHand 10, you can test the animation by using the Flash Controller toolbar to quickly see if the animation is what you want before you export.

11) Now go into the Export dialog. Select the SWF format. Go into the Options and make sure that you choose Layers as the Animation type as shown above. Then Export.