Animate characters in Flash

Life is about progression. For those artistic types out there, your first dalliances into creativity might have been scribbling on a piece of paper with a pencil or crayon. Over the years, you may have progressed from pencil to pen, from pen to paint, and finally from paint to the graphics tablet. You can now produce images that would have dazzled your crayon-wielding former self, but why stop here? It's now time for you to take the next step: to make your characters move.

This project is ideal if you can create characters in either Illustrator or Photoshop, but have limited experience with Flash. Over the following steps, I demonstrate how simple it is to set up character files and simple animations in Flash, with minimal need for redraws using character 'setup' files created in Illustrator.

Here, I use my file, skullman.ai, which you'll find in the support files - but there's no reason why you can't use your own character. Detailed knowledge of Flash isn't required, but before you start it would be helpful to be familiar with basic Flash CS3 and have some knowledge of how to make symbols, the timeline, onion-skinning, and how to navigate between symbols.

Click here to download the support files (529KB)

Click here to download the tutorial for free