Starting work in Flash.

Despite already having some experience in Flash I recently learned in class of a new method of structuring my animations in Flash. This consists of keeping everything on only one frame and making everything that you want animated a movie clip.

The screenshot above shows how my layer looks (along with my timeline). There are locks placed, which is simply allowing me to not edit anything other than I what I want to edit. Personally, I think using this type of method to produce Flash based animations (or anything to do with Flash) is very effective as it keeps the timeline clean and clear, thus eliminates any potential confusion from all the potential frames that appear.

One key part to the animated flourishes that will appear in my story is blinking. To make the characters more lively I think blinking is most likely the only way I can think of (apart from subtle movements of arms etc).

The screenshots above show exactly how I have done my blinking (I will use the same method for the rest of the characters in most scenes). As you can see it's extremely simply to do and doesn't take very long.