Steps to Create Animation
Before we begin our animation, we need a character. This little guy below is one that I quickly drew using a similar process to that described in another tutorial, Line Art In Flash. He looks a little bit lost, bless him. Let's call him Dexter.
At the moment, Dexter is just a collection of lines and fills, and not much good for animating. What we need to do is break up the character into his component parts (ouch!), and save them all as Library items.
Of course, the easiest way to do this is to simply draw each body part on a different layer as you go. That way, you can see how the fit together in relation to each other, get the sizes right etc etc. But if you've already drawn the character, then you'll just have to get your mouse dirty, get in there and pull poor Dexter to pieces. Select the lines and fills that make up a body part (say the head) then cut and paste into a new symbol. In a lot of case, you may find that a piece isn't complete, where it intersected with other areas. If that happens, then you just add some more lines and complete the part..
You can see from the picture above that Dexter is now split up into sections. Notice that although we only had one original eye image, I've duplicated the symbol and made three more versions, each with the lids closing. We need this to make him blink. I've also made a short movie clip for the mouth, containing a couple of lines / states for a talking mouth. A little tip for arms - make sure that the registration point is located at the 'shoulder' joint of the image. This makes it easier when you come to rotate them.
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