Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional Bible

Chapter 13. Character Animation Techniques

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introducing cartoon animation

• Discovering the importance of the storyboard

• Using cartoon sound: Voices, effects, and ambiance

• Expressing motion and emotion

• Anticipation, weight, and overlapping actions

• Walk cycles and coloring tricks

• Syncing with music and sound effects

• Leveraging inverse kinematics with the Bone tool

• Polishing Flash animation for broadcast

Flash is a powerful tool that continues to grow in popularity as a professional production option for creating high-quality cartoons and animated broadcast graphics. The best thing about Flash cartoons is that you don't always know they were created in Flash when you see them. Flash allows artists to create characters in nearly any style they can dream up. Although Flash makes it especially easy to produce clean, geometric designs, it can also be used for sketchy hand-drawn styles, or even for collage animation that uses source material from photos or video. This is the result of Flash's unique drawing tools, media-friendly authoring environment, and scalability. By "scalability," we mean that a Flash cartoon can be scaled down for delivery on the Web or scaled up to the size and resolution needed for video or film presentation. Creating broadcast cartoons can be extremely complex — specialized techniques are covered in many books and classes — so in this chapter we focus on some basics to get you started.

Although Flash includes some special techniques, most of the basic principles ...