I’ve been experimenting with symbol-based Flash animation this week. I figure it’s a good skill to add to my animation bag-o-tricks, especially if I ever want to integrate animation into a web design.

Here’s a dog that jumps:

Symbol-based dog animation from Jill AB on Vimeo.

Not bad for a first try… I’m still nailing down the process, and next time the timing will be a lot tighter hopefully. Plus I gotta find a way to get those tricky “caps” (elbows and knees) closed when the legs and arms bend. Character rigging is a big part of this, and I already learned a few things with this one. Mostly, what NOT to do when designing and rigging a character.Another thing I took away from this experiment is to not force myself to stick with one type of animation. At first I created everything as symbols and made myself stick to motion tweens. But it was much easier to get everything to look right if I mixed it up with some frame-by-frame action and some shape tweens. I picked up this book the other day, and lo and behold, that’s exactly the advice the author gives: just do what you gotta do, use whatever tools you have to use to make it work.

Next I want to do a walk/run cycle, and improve the timing and squash/stretch to make it look more like a hand-drawn animation, and not a Flash puppet.