How to Animate Cartoons Using Flash CS3
Adobe Flash CS3 supports many ways to animate objects, including "tweens" that create certain types of movement automatically and ActionScript animations created through programming. However, to animate cartoons where characters have several moving parts, such as arms and legs, you should use Flash's most basic type of animation, "frame-by-frame." With this method you animate your characters one frame at a time. Flash's frames are similar to film-strip frames. They create the illusion of movement by displaying objects in slightly different poses or positions, one frame after another in rapid succession.
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Instructions
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Animating the Cartoon
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Open a new Flash FLA movie: Click "File" on the menu bar and choose "New." This opens the New Document dialog box. Click "Flash File (ActionScript 3.0)."
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Import or draw the first frame of your cartoon on the stage. You can create your cartoon frames in an external drawing program, such as Illustrator, or use Flash's drawing tools to draw them. Each frame in an animation is called a "pose." Each pose is a slight variation of the previous pose.
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3
Right-click the next frame in the Timeline panel and choose "Insert Blank Keyframe" from the fly-out menu. A blank keyframe gives you a blank stage for creating the next pose.
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Import or draw the next pose on the stage, changing the pose slightly. What you do here depends on the type of animation you want. If your animation simply shifts an object from one location to another on the stage, move the object slightly in the direction you want it to shift. To simulate the movement of one or more body parts, reposition, or create a new pose from, the parts of the cartoon figure you want to animate.
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5
Continue inserting blank keyframes and moving and manipulating your object in each frame until you have completed the animation sequence.
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Test the movie (click "Control" on the menu bar and choose "Test Movie"). The animation should play frame by frame just as you manipulated it across the stage and timeline.
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Tips & Warnings
For smoother animations, use many frames and poses. Fewer frames and poses cause a jerky, disjointed movement.
You can use Flash's Onion Skin option---the buttons directly below the Timeline, to view previous frames in the animation. This provides a visual reference as you draw each new pose.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Cartoon Eye image by hellotim from Fotolia.com
