Creating an Animatic in FLASH Tutorial

I'm working on a group project and thought it was a good idea to do a test animation first. I picked a scene from one of my favorite movies: Kung Fu Hustle. The reason I did this was so we already had voice and sound sorted, so we only really needed to focus on character design and animation.

The team was started on character concepts, the designs that were picked were done by Michelle Henderson:

I then did a rough animatic of the scene :

For anybody who wants to know how I put it together, here's a step by step:

1. I opened up a document in Photoshop with the youtube aspect ration (16:9), I then drew every frame on a separate layer. The Background has it's own layer and any additional characters as well.

2. Sticking to the source material footage from Kung Fu Hustle, I made a drawing for every change in pose. This is how things are done for tv animation, because everything needs to be done fast. The director approves the poses of the storyboard, the animator needs to stick to this. This is different in feature, where animators will design their own keys.

3. Every time the camera changes, we start a new "scene". I have labelled the scene numbers in the top right corner. The supervisor on animation can then hand out the scenes to his animators. In tv animation, the animator will draw all the characters and props in the scene. In feature it is possible that different characters in the scene are animated by different animators.

4. When I finished, I saved all the images by number (01, 02, 03, 04, etc..) so that when I import these to the stage in Flash, Flash will open up all images and put them on their own frame.

Flash > open a new document
File>Import>Import to stage

5. I then added the audio file (wav file in this case), and timed the images to match the audio.

6. Ready to export the animatic as a mov. file, so I could upload to youtube.
File>Export>Export movie

ISSUES ENCOUNTERED:

- Exporting to a mov. clip (Quicktime) with Flash isn't always working, in 3 of my exports there was some screen tearing. I need to find a good swf > mov/avi converter for mac.


I then started my rough animation in Flash (honestly I don't draw well in flash but if I keep drawing in Flash I am bound to get better :P). And that's one of my motto's, don't do things the way you know how to do them, do it the hard way..learn, evolve!

I also created some notes about how my workspace is set up when animating in flash: download the image here)

And finally a quick test on how I'd do clean up in Photoshop: