As part of the refresher course on basic animation principles, let's take a look at how to apply those principles in Flash. Many of these lessons originated in Flash 8, but the basic idea remains sound: translating pencil-and-paper animation techniques into a digital workflow using Flash's tools, which can significantly reduce the time and effort involved in frame-by-frame animation.

Ever watched a Flash animation that just uses the same yak-yak-yak mouth movement for all speech? That's fine for quick little shorts, but for more detailed animation it's always jarring to see mouth movements that don't actually match what the characters are saying. To properly animate speech, you need to understand phonemes: the way the mouth shapes to form each letter. This basic chart of phonemes can help you with drawing mouth movements for speech in animation.

The Preston-Blair Walk Cycle is one of the most recognized staples of traditional animation. Mastering the walk cycle is always a hallmark for any fledgling animator; the Preston-Blair cycle breaks a single step down into eight easily comprehensible stages, which can then be repeated for the second step (just mirrored). In this lesson, we take the simple Preston-Blair a step further and recreate it using basic stick figures in Flash.

I'm working on building some new Flash content hubs and fleshing out the lessons available, but before I do that I'd like to know what you want to see. What are you hoping to get out of Flash lessons? With a program that has so many diverse applications, sometimes it's hard to choose just one focus - so tell me where your interests lie. What do you want most to learn about Flash?