bluehickey: I'm trying to work on an animation at the moment in Flash, and I couldn't find the info I was looking for on flashkit, so I'm hoping you might point me in the right direction.
Are you creating your animations all frame by frame or are you using tweening? I would hazard a guess that you are using tweening on colour changes, lighting etc, but are you using it at all on your characters? The only way I've been able to achieve decent movement with my characters is frame by frame. I thought I'd better check if that's the way to go about things, or if there's a faster way with tweening. I hope you can understand what I'm getting at?!
P.S. I was going to PM this, but I thought others may be interested too.
I'm not my bluehickey, but I'll give my advice on Flash if you'd like it.
Use both. Usually, my work consists of frame-by-frame work layered with tweened symbols. If tweeing can accomplish the goal, I use it. If not, I start drawing my frames. Often, I have both going on simultaneously for various aspects of a sequence.
Hope this helped at least a little.
Fourchinnigan Productions | Journal | Fourchinnigan Publications
Right now at Flashkit there are a handful of new people that are swearing the only way to animate is frame by frame. And I am not sure they understand exactly what they are promoting. They all seem relatively new to animation, so they not the source of all wisdom on this matter. FlashFilmmaker.com has the more seasoned animators at the moment, and they would agree with 4Chin. The way that Flash can produce such small file size animations is through the reuse of symbols throughout the production and if a secondary action can be tweened to imply movement, then that's how you do it.
An example would be a walk cycle, you lay the basic movement out frame by frame, but you tween that symbol to actually make the character move in one direction or the other. Learn to use "ease in" and "ease out" to adjust your tweens, and guide layers are key to get away from that newby tweened look.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
I agree with the comments said so far. My approach is to rough everything out with a traditional animation mindset. Using the drawing tablet, I animate the action, then when I go in to clean everything up, I'll disect each motion and ask myself where symbols can be used. If a character is raising his hand in a side view, I can just draw one arm, and tween it from the start to end position, using ease in and out to keep the action looking natural. But it the character is waving his hand back and forth in front of the viewer, then that is done by drawing the different hand positions needed, because tweening can't figure that out for you.
A good example of a scene using both tweened symbols and drawn inbetweens is the scene in Carbonite Confusion where Sean Connery leans in from the shadows and reveals himself. The head is a symbol with the first key frame's darkness turned down to "100". He leans in and the head is scaled up and the darkness is turned off, or set to "0". But because his torso is changing in perspective, I drew the different poses needed to inbetween the animation.
Hope that helps out some.
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
Good advise above.
I tried to do a short with oil paints, but it was taking waaaay too long. It was for a local movie theatre, and man did they get angry when I started on thier canvas...it was huge, too! Darn curtains.
I think they have issues.
Splatman:D
SPLAT digital
Thank you everyone for your info!
Phacker: I checked out FlashFilmmaker.com. Thanks for the link. It will be great when they finish all of the tutorials in there. The first 2 were very helpful. I agree with you about Flashkit. They've got me out of trouble before when I couldn't figure out a specific software-related issue, but most of the stuff on there seems to be aimed at web developers...that's just my take on it anyway.
Splatman: Gee I must have been out of it earlier. I read your post and couldn't figure out what you were talking about... I just got it and got a laugh out of it.... :)
...but by golly ya gotta try! ;)
Splatman :D
SPLAT digital
Keenasmustard,
Good advice they're giving you. I agree w/ them all.
To pick up on what Bluehicky was saying about disecting a shot....for me it is very helpful to create an animatic with my storyboards then 'slug' or time out each shot/scene. Then I look at that scene and ask my self, 'self, what can I get away with using symbols and still maintain the overall feel I'm going for, and what definitely needs to be frame by frame.' for example, if something is changing angles...like rotating or something, you'd need to go frame by frame, but if something is maintaining the same orientation to the 'camera' but changes color and/or size, use a symbol. Secondary action like clothes flapping etc. needs to be done frame by frame for the most part.
I hope that helps. My main point is that creating the animatic will help you plan and disect each scene.
God bless!
Thanks Thampson! I've got another question for you all now:
I need to convert a swf to an avi/mpeg. The important part as well is that I need to retain the soundtrack within the animation too. I think someone a while back put me onto Magic SWF2AVI, which I had some problems with. I wanted to try it again, but the trial period has run out and it won't let me "try" it again. I've seen a few other programs getting around, but most of them you have to pay for, and I don't want to do that, especially if I haven't been able to test that they work first. Some I've tried didn't retain the sound file. Does anyone know of a program they'd recommend and know will do what I'm asking (particularly with the sound issue)? Alternatively, I heard someone say that you can import the swf into Flash and then export it out again as an avi. It didn't work for me, but maybe I was doing something wrong. BTW, in case you were wondering, no I don't have the original Flash file... I accidentally deleted it when I reformatted grrrrrr!!
Hi gauys!!! recently i have found one programm that coverts video to flash without any quality losses & allows to have Full control over the converted Flash Video: video quality, frame rate, size, duration and other parameters.You do not need any special programs or plugins to create SWF video file, simple select and convert Video to swf Flash file. You can download the app from:http://www.geovid.com/Video_to_Flash_Converter/