My Fist Animation using Adobe Flash

This is an animation showing a stickman running across the beach, while 2 birds fly through the screen:

The screenshot above shows the 3 different layers I have created for each of the different actions in my animation. The first layer is the one of my stickman, it features a sequence of frames, which play one after another to create the illusion of my stickman running across the beach.

Each "dot" represents a new frame. However I figured that drawing each frame one by one would take too long, and so I decided to skip every other frame to save time.

I did this by pressing f5 after each frame. This means that now instead of one second of my clip consisting of 24 frames, it is halved to 12. This literally means that instead of 24 frames passing through the screen in 1 second, only 12 do. The result of this is that the image doesn't look as smooth as it would otherwise. I made this decision because since this is my first animation, it was more important to get the taste of using all the other tools in Flash, so that later on I can work on a higher-quality animation.

Another tool I used to create my animation, was a tool called "Onion Skin". This tool enabled me to see the previous frame I had drawn while working on my current one.

The image above shows the effect created by Onion Skin on my current frame. As we can see there are two drawings of a stickman, the faded one is the image from the previous frame and the one that is highlighted is the current image I am working on. This feature has proven to be very useful as it allows me to see what my last image was so that I can draw my current one progressing slightly differently to create the illusion of motion.

Lastly I am going to discuss the choice of layers I used in my animation. There are 3 present layers that make up this 10 second animation. As already discussed the first layer is responsible for the movement of my stickman. The second layer corresponds to the two birds that fly over the sea. I have animated them on the same basis as the stickman, which I talked about.

The last layer is the background. Take notice that there are no changes to the individual frames throughout the animation. Instead there same frame is repeated throughout the entire length of the clip. The reason for this is that the background doesn't need to change, in this case it simply adds context to the 2 subjects of this animation which are the stickman and the 2 birds.