What's a good resource for learning how to make flash animations?

Question

I want to learn flash animation.

Are there any good resources I could study and which program should I use?

Answer 1

One of our Lecturers at university provides all his teaching material on his website so that anyone interested in learning Flash can go through the same tutorials / leture notes that someone studying the course for real.

The website is: http://www.gavinsim.com/teaching/index.html

Image Manipulation and Interactive Flash Programming - CO2711

Audio and Motion Graphics - CO2711

Multimedia Development - CO4740

Course Material - CO4741

There is a bit of Overlap between the courses but i found that this was an excellent place to start and built it up from there.

The lectures assume availability of Flash CS4 and AS3

Answer 2

One option is to follow the part of Flex in a Week (scroll down a bit to see it) that is about animation.

Flex in a Week is a series of 47 video tutorials and 26 exercises and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Flex is a SDK for the development and deployment of Internet applications based on Flash.

Answer 3

These ones are probably interesting for you to check and study:

http://www.cartoonsmart.com/index.html

Software? Flash, really. Is a industry standard. And even when HTML 5 becoming strong,(perhaps long way before it can really compete, I don't know) I expect Adobe making something to output html5, they have the tool dominating the market already. For a worker, it's important this matter, is what you'll be asked to be skilled at, like always in these cases :)

As alternatives, but I really recommend mastering Adobe's Flash, you can have a look at ToonBoon, Koolmoves, AnimeStudio (before was Moho from LostMarble, it allowed setting bones in 2d...) But these are mostly (koolmoves a bit more general) just for the character animation part, Flash makes many more things.

But really, Adobe Flash CS5 all the way.

EDIT -- Ouch, forgot some key resources:

flashkit.com (and really great forums here)

kirupa.com

There are many more, but with all this you have a lot of work already :)

Answer 4

I really recommend the For Dummies books on Flash. Although they are quite literally written for dummies, you can skim and skip your way around. They're pretty gentle but comprehensive introductions.