Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: Keyframe and In-Between Basics

And here's my finished animation--crude, but it demonstrates the techniques appropriately, and to repeat the cycle all I had to do was copy the keyframes and then paste them, before moving their positions to reflect the advancing motion. Now that you've got the basic technique out of the way, get used to using it and spend some time just drawing in Flash to get accustomed to the feel of it so that you'll be more comfortable with the next lesson, where we'll start the basis for a more complex character drawing that we'll take through several stages: rough motion, detailed rough motion, smooth line work, solid color, and highlights and shadows.

Just a short animation will take several weeks of progressive steps, though the amount of actual working time that we'll put in will be negligible compared to the amount of time spend hand-drawing full-length feature films, and the workload will be much lighter. Working in Flash, we can single-handedly accomplish what normally requires a full team of animators.