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Flash animation and more...

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Flash animation and more...

Hey guys

I've been trying to find some guides to animating traditionally in flash, but have only come across the most basic tutorials.
Are there more comprehensive guides out there? Things such as improving work flow or useful features to use, for example.

My second topic is about how to improve at 'cartoon' characters.
I come from a very 'academic' drawing background if you will, strongly focused in realism and such. I would say I have a decent grasp of the fundamentals of drawing. (my work can be found here.)
My problem is that, for as long as I can remember, in all stages of my progression, I've always found it more difficult to draw simplified characters to typical animation styles, particularly when I need to adhere to an existing style. I feel like there's some sort of foundation that I'm missing.

If you guys have some tips for me on this matter, I would greatly appreciated it.

Thanks.

I just did a search on Flash Tutorial and found a few of them. Try expanding your terms like, DVD or Class. You might even wont to check for books because sometimes the publisher may offer DVD's on the subject.

As for the truly advance stuff, you should check out magazine publications.

Please post your stuff here so we can check it out.

Wontobe: Thanks for the tips.

I'll post some relatively recent work. It's gonna be a really mixed bag of stuff. (ok, not really since there's a 4 image limit)

If you want to learn how to animate traditionally in Flash, here's what you do HK. Get a book or take classes for traditional hand drawn animation. Then buy one of those Quick Start books on Flash. This will tell you the basics of Flash. Not how to animate but how to navigate around the program and what does what. Then take your traditional animation knowledge and using the brush or pencil tool in Flash, animate your heart out.

What might not be covered in the animation books is animating in layers. In Flash, you can have a ton of layers. So draw your background layer and put that on the bottom. Then you can work your way up, background characters, main characters, overlays, so on and so forth.

Flash is very fun to draw rough traditional animation or storyboards because you can time out your roughs and watch it in real time. As you use Flash more and more, you'll learn and develop tricks that will make your work better and faster.

Aloha,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

Ape: Thanks for the advice.
I have studied animation at a school, and I should've mentioned earlier that I've just started working at a small studio. Flash is their software of choice and I do know how to use the basic functions to create frame-by-frame animation.

I suppose I will have to look at 'general' Flash guides, as Wontobe also alluded to.

I'll dig up some animation related work to post later.