Hour 22. Advanced Animation Techniques

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to create animations without tweening

• How to apply traditional animation techniques like anticipation and overkill

• How to simulate depth and perspective

We've explored all the built-in animation tools in Flash. Keyframes, motion and shape tweens, onion skinning, masking, and guides these should all be pretty familiar. What else is there to learn? How to make really effective animations! This hour we'll study some advanced animation techniques that will make your animations more effective, appear more believable, and maybe even take less work to create (although that's not the highest priority). A lot of the material this hour is just an application of traditional animation techniques developed over the years by conventional animators. Although the concepts you'll learn are not completely new to the world of animation, the techniques you'll be applying to Flash might be new to you.

The two different paths Flash authors tend to follow are application programming and animation. Some people describe the programmers as "technical" and the animators as "artistic." This is a mistake because programming can be very creative, and visual communication can be very technical. The tendency to specialize isn't necessarily because of a natural aversion to one direction or an inclination in another.

It may seem that in this hour we're taking a break from technical issues because in recent hours we've been studying issues such as file size and scripting, but this hour will be just as technical just applied to making animations.