Flash Animation 7: Let's Move, Baby.

This final product is a bit rough, because the frames tend to blur and twitch a bit on an animated GIF so the facial features jump a bit too much. But you can see (barely) that the eyeballs slide to the left, and the eyebrows move under the hair. We've got a fully animated character, gesturing and talking to us with some kind of life and expression. If you take the time to detail your animation more, you can get smooth motion, especially when working in Flash SWF format.

If you want to experiment even further, try making different mouth-shapes; draw the phonemes detailed in the lip-synching overview, and import them as symbols. Try placing them on the appropriate frames as you sound out the script you've written.

In the next lesson we'll add a basic audio track and learn how to work with sound in Flash. Try tweaking your animation and trying to produce something better than the basics in the time between; get used to the ideas we've worked with, and get comfortable with this method of animating in Flash. We've used a lot of shortcuts here, but if you use just the shortcuts it'll never look any better than that jerky thing you're looking at up there. You'll still have to put some time and effort into it--but at least you're not drawing every frame by hand.