I'm going to show you a trick that I use when drawing frame-by-frame animation, whether by hand or in Flash. I tend to treat it a bit like geometry: I pick important points on my shape--four points on a circle, top, bottom, left and right, or say on an arm you may pick shoulder, outer elbow, inner elbow, wrist, fingertips--and then match those points on the next keyframe, before creating a new layer and drawing lines on that layer to connect those points. Then I just brush little dots or tic-marks to the halfway point of each line, eyeballing to estimate where those points would have traveled on a straight line on that in-between frame.
Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: Keyframe and In-Between Basics
By Adrien-Luc Sanders, About.com Guide
With our key frames in place, we need to draw our in-betweens. In-betweens are exactly what they sound like: frames filling in the motion in between our primary points. Although keyframes are important, in-betweens are, to me, more difficult--because you can't just pick a point and draw. You have to accurately represent the transition between frames by drawing the state that the object/character is in at a point halfway between keyframes, and then halfway between again, and halfway between again--and that can take a great deal of time, concentration, and educated guesswork.
Prev
- Animation Basics: Getting Started
- Starting Point: First Key
- Creating More Keys
- In-Betweening
- In-Betweening II
- Viewing Motion Sequence
- Repeating and Adjusting the Timeline
- Cleaning up the Line Art
- Filling in Remaining Frames, Adjusting
- Finished Result
Explore Animation
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