flash movies

[Dona Maria]

I was wondering if any of you had any experience in making flash movies. i want to give it a try but i dont know what program to use (i have a mac) or any other basic knowledge in making them. so! if any of you have some advice or some starting tips, they'd be greatly appreciated.

[Sever"n"steal]

I do... Do it one frame at a time using MICROMEDIA FLASH.Thats how I created this...

[Trev-MUN Hates AOL]

Yeah, I have experience. (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=98335).

Uh... lesse.

As far as I know there's only one program family out there that develops flash movies, and that's Macromedia's own Flash family of programs. I haven't heard of any others.

Flash, like most web and media development programs, is absurdly expensive - but at least it's not like the grand plus you have to shell out for a recent 3d media program like 3DS Max. You can get Flash at a lower price if you go for one that's educational purposes only - in other words, it's illegal for you to sell stuff you make with a product that has an educational liscence.

Pointers. For one, I believe that frame rate has no bearing on file size itself.

Second, layers are your FRIEND. Tweens can be very assinine about things, and often you'll have to use multiple layers for stuff... at least, that's in my experience. Trying to have two things tweened in one layer = no go.

Speaking of that... if you're good with drawing and animation, shoot for frame-by-frame; drawing the animation directly to each frame. You can still get good results with tweening if you want to go that route though. Examples would include anything by Legendary Frog or the Homestar Runner stuff. You may wind up doing a mixture of both, which is perfectly fine.

Don't forget that a symbol can have its own layers, too. You can make a symbol that's a contained, looped animation and have multiple layered stuff going on there, too.

If you plan to use flash to make .avi files, though, keep in mind that symbols won't play when exported to such. Again, that's from my experience, if there's a way to make them play for an avi export then I've yet to find it.