Animating the Human figure and animals.

Animating people doing stuff like walking, running, jumping and throwing and making it look right in Flash separates the pros from the rest and there are books and tutorials out there to make it possible.

Making your characters or animals look realistic in Flash animations by using tweening just doesn't always look realistic. As a matter of fact, tweening arms, legs and heads just ought to be kept at a minimum. Frame by frame animation is best even though it means much more work. Tweening can be for times when someone is falling, gliding, sliding, etc. Or for the bouncing head or body for exaggerated indication of emotion such as surprise, shock or bafflement.

But for the most part, tweening arms and legs for most human and animal movements should be avoided.

Even when you use an animation program such as Anime Studio from e-Frontier, formerly known as Moho by Lost Marble which uses animation bones to make knees, elboes and necks bend and move as seen in professionally made animations like on Cartoonnetwork, frame by frame is still best in Flash.

Please keep in mind that the running, walking, throwing and flying sequences that you create can be saved for future work as movie clips or whatever.

Those really top notch animations that look very realistic are based on human actors whose motions were captured by digital cameras. The techniques involved with such work is beyond the scope of this tutorial and won't be covered for a while.

It's not a bad idea to video record a few cartoon animations and place the .avi file into Flash, say a few seconds of a scene showing a figure running, walking, flying or jumping. Then create a layer above it to copy the movements of the legs, arms, torso and head.

There are 2 books that are must for the beginning animator. Every serious animator should have these in their library for study of human and animal motion. These are the Tezuka School of Animation, Volume 1, Learning the Basics and Volume 2, Animals in Motion. Each contains hundreds of drawings of people and animals in motion at various angles. Heads at variation angles are also covered.

As far as I know these are the only books of their kind anywhere.

The author and artist of these is Osamu Tezuka who is known as the father of Japanese animation and the father of Manga. As far as I'm concerned, his work became the foundation of some of Disney's animation work although I imagine Disney will never admit it!

These books are about $15 each and are usually available online from Amazon.com and are worth every penny. Volume 2 can be found at times in the cartooning section of many Borders bookstores, but these are snatched up so fast that it can be challenging to buy one yourself! It's better to just buy a few online!

Another way to study human motion is to do something quite a few beginning animators do and some professional too, although quietly, is to digitally record some good quality animations and cartoons from TV or DVDs and study them frame by frame to see how a particular studio does things.

I use a video capture card to record animation right from the satellite receiver or a DVD. I have a DVD player that can go frame by frame, zoom in, freeze and so on. I can see what the animator did to achieve a particular sequence and learn from it. I also do my own work in front of a blue screen right here with a camera, capturing it to the computer for tracing or rotoscoping. For animating a particular sequence, this is about the only way to do it.

One thing you may observe from the study of professional animation in this way is the amount of fudging over that is done. That is, you will see how animators often fool the eye of the viewer making them thing they saw something which wasn't really there. Fooling the eyes and brains of the viewer is done a lot with fast action scenes, such as in running, fleeing, fighting, accidents or whatever. The animators let the imagination of the viewer "fill in" what is actually missing in the animation and the viewer never catches on unless they were to watch that sequence very slowly.

For instance, when a character flashes out a arm toward someone or something real fast, there are probably no in-betweens of the arm reaching up then extending to it's final position. There may be one or two frames of a blurred arm at most, but sometimes not. The arm will be at the side of the character one moment, then Zip it's out extended. The viewer's imagination assumes there was motion inbetween, but there wasn't. The brain was fooled and animators count on that.

Another trick with that is to help fool the viewer's brain with appropriately loud music and/or special effects. The animator may not want to put a whole lot of time and effort in a fight scene for instance because of time or budget constraints. So, the producer/animator may put in some loud sound during that sequence to help fool the viewer see it better than what it really is!

Ever notice in the arm or leg zipping outward sequence you may hear a loud whipping or snapping sound? That sound is to help make that motion look realistic. If you watch some animation without sound, you will see what I mean and how important sound effects are to the animation process.

Yet another trick to draw attention away from a difficult animation sequence is to place flashing backgrounds to attract attention. If a character is running while making punching motions with the arms, fast action in the background will help make the character's movements look better.

Many animators hide some of the walking or running sequence with objects such as furniture, bushes, trees, junk, etc. You get the picture. The viewer's imagination fills in what is needed, and the animator's work is thus easier.

Another technique is to use relatively small legs on a character, typically in black pants. For instance, the main character Timmy in the presently popular animation The Fairly Odd Parents has very small legs and his arms aren't much bigger. Small legs are much easier to show walking or running.

Timmy's legs when running are too small to see much of anything and the viewer isn't going to care about that. Again, the animator's work is made easier than if he or she were to use larger limbs!

A Flash animator who uses this technique to good effect is Joe Corrao who created the Sluggo and Poppo animations. Sluggy the human is mostly head and fat torso, the legs being short and thin like sticks. The arms are also thin like sticks but longer to give more expression.

The use of black clothing makes it easier to create realistic looking bending knees and elbows in Flash. You don't have to be concerned with lines curving into the wrong areas of a leg or arm when pivoting them. Arms are, of course, flesh colored and that takes more work. The use of patches to help for that work will be covered later.

Also much of the leg action can simply be off camera or off stage so to speak. The feet and bottom part of the legs can just be too low to be seen.

There is a technique credited to Hanna-Barbera (now known as Cartoon Network Studios) that helps animation work look good while making less work for the animators. That involves the use of collars, neckties, bracelets and necklaces to hide joints and necks that are to bend. It's work to make wrists and necks look ok when bending, so Hanna Barbera pioneered the use of clothing or jewelry to help hide those joints.

For instance, ever notice old Fred Flintstone always wears that necktie except in bed? His wife Wilma always has that large necklace? Those help hide joints that bend making the work easier. Yogi Bear had that collar and green tie on his neck, George Jetson sported a high, futuristic collar as well as Astro his dog while Quick Draw McGraw sported a scarf.