Preparing Your Content For Animation

Previous chapters have covered the Flash interface and all the building blocks that you can use in Flash. Now it's time to look at one of the most fundamental skills you need to work in Flash: animating on the timeline.

Before jumping into the specifics of animating, this chapter explores ways that you can prepare your content so that when you start animating you'll create small files and clean animations. The file size that matters is that of the .swf file you will publish, rather than the .fla document in which you work. To work effectively in Flash, you need to use symbols to organize your visual content.