Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: Detailed Animation Part V

To add a bit more human expression to this bald-boy we’ve been animating, it’s time to add the eyes. This is where Flash really comes in handy, because we’ll only have to draw the eyes in this particular animation twice—rather than drawing them over and over and over for every frame as we did with the base shape. After creating our basic eye shape, we can use the Free Transform Tool to just adjust the angle and size of each instance of the eye so that it fits properly to the angle of the head in each frame.

The first step is to create a new symbol, where we’ll build the eye. Just click Insert->New Symbol (Ctrl+F8), type in a name for your symbol (I started off naming mine Eye, but changed it to Right Eye later), and set the type to Graphic.