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Flash Animation 7: Let's Move, Baby.

By Adrien-Luc Sanders, About.com

6 of 10

Animating Inside of Movie Clips III

Once you're done, do not apply a motion tween to this. It will make a mess of things and you'll have your entire arm bouncing around a bit. This makes for some pretty jerky animation, but for web purposes it will do. If you want you can go frame-by-frame, but the motions involved here are so small that it's really not that necessary, as a little jerkiness is pretty tolerable (though this animated GIF makes it look worse than it really is. If this were something I was doing for more than a demonstrative lesson, I would go through and stage keys every two frames to make it smoother).

You can scrub your timeline to see how the movement of the forearm will look, but in order to view the entire thing with the movement of the entire arm, you'll have to preview, as the motion of movie clips doesn't show up in the main scene. You should have complex paired motion akin to the image above.

Next you're going to go one level deeper and, while inside the symbol for the arm, double-click on the symbol for the forearm to get inside of that. On this level you'll animate the motion of your hand only; I'm not going to walk you through it again as you should have the hang of it, but remember to move your pivot point to your wrist. For a bit more natural movement, try to time the most movement of your hands with the pauses or smaller motions of the forearm, while they may stay still or only move a little bit while the arm is swinging in larger arcs.

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