Creating a character is a work of art. Many animators use Flash to create their characters for presentation.
This is due to Flash’s ability to present the content over the web as well as other presentation platforms. Flash also has many tools that aid in character creation such as the use of symbols, ActionScript and tweening.
Flash allows you to present your character creations in a variety of media formats. The most popular medium is the internet. This is logical because flash was originally designed to present animations over the internet. However, flash animations can also be distributed in self-contained files that you can send to people via snail mail on CD or via email. Flash animations can also be exported as QuickTime movies and put on DVD or even broadcast on television. This saves having to re-animate you character creations many times, in many different programs, or going through difficult conversions.
Symbols in Flash make it easy to animate. Here’s how they work. First go through the character creation process of planning and drawing your character. Then make each of the parts a symbol (like a nested composition) and animate the symbols. If you need to change a character’s body, you can simply animate the movement inside the symbol without affecting the position or orientation of the symbol. This makes creating a character very simple and keeps drawing to a minimum by reusing the work that you have already done.
Flash is famous for its ability to tween. By telling the computer where to start and stop the animation, Flash will do everything in between. This saves hours upon hours for animators because it frees them from drawing each frame and lets them focus more on other aspects of animation, such as the story line or the sound. This dramatically speeds up the character creation process.
ActionScript (the Flash scripting language) provides truly powerful animation capabilities. With ActionScript motion can be determined dynamically. Like a ball that follows the mouse pointer for example. In terms of character creation you could animate your character completely through ActionScript or use a combination of ActionScript and Tweening to accomplish the task in dynamic ways.
Flash is the number one choice for character creation. Animations are easily disseminated and characters and their body parts can be reusable through the use of symbols through flash. Finally, the process of animating is made easier through tweening technology and ActionScript. Flash has many more capabilities that make it great for character creation that are not covered here. The character creation process is covered more in detail in my article “making a cartoon baby“.
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