Antomy of a Flash Animation- con't...

Postwork Prep:

Once we're into the postworking phase, I have to make sure that I have all the pieces constructed, or else I'll be back in there, trying to draw an arm piece or a leg piece and re-exporting them. The beauty of Flash is that if you name the piece the same and import it, it can overwrite the original piece so you won't have to start your mini-movie animations from scratch. More on this later. Right now we need to concentrate on making the peices we need in our photo manipulation program of choice. Mine is Photoshop, so I will be referencing everything to this during this tutorial.

We know we need some arm movements and leg movements, so let's get to chopping up these robots, shall we. Every piece that gets animated will need to be separated. Arms. legs, heads, torsos, whatever. In most cases, we can separate these in Flash using the <break-apart> command which allows you to edit any picture - raster-based or not. But some will require the tools that only photoshop has, like smudging, cloning and painting.To start with I like to put all the needed pieces in one psd file and name them accordingly. In this case I take the original pictures separate the pieces, and name them as to the picture reference.

Final Output:

Now l can crop the pieces and export them as png-24 files to import into Flash. If I did it right all the pieces will fit together in flash and create a believable animation. Keep in mind that for Background pictures, exporting as a jpeg file is perfectly alright, but gif files don't usually look that good in Flash. The png format keeps the transparency layer as well as the color information stable. During the process of creating any Flash animation I usually make several mini-movies (movies within movies) that run separately and create ongoing animations that work while the main playback is paused for input. This couldn't work without all the little pieces that make up each character.

Below you will see the final Flash piece and see what I did with all the separated pieces.