How do you guys animate a character walking using flash?

My procedure is this:

I use a mouse to draw rough keys in Flash (or Toonboom). These keys are very crude. I am just looking at the movement of the main masses in the character. There are usually few keys, so it can take an hour or two to do a few seconds worth of keys, depending on the movement. If I decide to chuck the whole set and try again, I haven't lost much.

Once happy with the movement, I sit down next to the computer and look at these keys as a guide for drawing rough keys on paper. I then use a webcam to capture the drawings and import them into the animation software. This is a very quick process since it just depends on how fast I can peel a drawing off the pegbar and snap the next one underneath.

With the drawings on the computer, I use the "mouse test" keys to set the initial timing, by lining up the drawings with these initial keys and then adjust from there. When the timing looks good, I do the breakdowns and inbetweens on paper. I do lots of tests along the way since capturing the drawings with a webcam is so fast.

The final cleanup drawings are scanned in color. Vectorizing in Toonboom, by the way, ignores all colors except black. So the drawings are roughed out in red or blue and then cleaned up in black. The whole mess imports as a nicely cleaned up drawing with all the rough construction parts gone. Since Flash imports in color, any color on the page, including the white page itself, is retained in the vectorized version.

Hi Doc,

I think you might have been confused or the people talking about using a wacom might not have been clear about what they ment.

If you draw your animation directly into Flash, either with a wacom or a mouse, you have your pencil test already done. By this I mean you can scrub through the time line and/or export out your clip to see how it plays. Waaa la, instant pencil test. Now if your keys are too close together or the drawings don't work, you can go into Flash and adjust them to what works. On occasion I rough out what I what to happen with the brush tool, esspecially if it's a complicated action or a character. Other times I just move my symbol assets to where I think they should be and test it to see if it works.

If you want to go the draw and scan route, you can do that as well with Flash. Draw out your key poses, then scan them in, and import them into Flash. Now you can space them out on the timeline and check to see if the timing and poses are working. If not, you can move the drawings around on the timeline or draw more drawings if you need to.

I hope this helps you out some and doesn't confuse you even more.

Aloha,
the Ape

After reading Greg Mimmack's process of animating I groaned out loud! What a laborious waste of time!!!! He is roughing out his animation twice, once in the computer, and then again on paper. That's just not necessary.
I used to draw on paper and scan too, but once I learned how to draw with a drawing tablet, there is no better way. You rough it in flash, play with the timing and then clean it up in there as well. Time saving and saves file size too because your lines are cleaner than scanned in lines and makes for a smaller file size over all. And there are no extra steps of pegbars, webcams and bitmap tracing to deal with either.

PLEASE BUY A TABLET!!!!

I second that motion. It seems expensive, but for what it provides from a teaching standpoint when learning animation it's pretty invaluable.

I have to concur that a tablet is well worth the investment. I prefer Intuos but the Graphires are very good and much less expensive.

My process is pretty simple. When I do rough, which isn't always, I use the brush tool in Flash and sketch in the keys on a guide layer the way you would on paper. I then draw the character elements or pose the symbols directly over it. I tween as necessary or draw new frames, depending. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Hi Doc,

On Foster's we animate on PC's using Flash. We also use Illustrator as well as After Effects for compositing on Macs. Oh, and we use Wacoms to animate with, although some people prefer still using the mouse.

Aloha,
the Ape