Miraz Tutorials

This tutorial will teach you the basics of how to animate a stick man in Flash a very sought after technique but very simple to do. It requires frame by frame animation and can be sometimes time consuming but the end effect is very entertaining. This tutorial requires you have a copy of Flash CS3 or Flash 5 upwards. You should have knowledge of shape tweening and should also know how to use the time line with key frames.

This is what you will create

using Flash player 9

Firstly open a new .fla file in Flash

Then draw out a rectangle and increase the line densitiy in the first frame via the properties pannel

Add a key frame about 20 frames down and then add a shape tween to animate the rectangle opening. In this frame you will start off by drawing in your stickmans arm to start off the animation.

Then frame by frame start adding more to your stick man animating him walking onto the stage do this in a separate layer.

You will need to click the onion skin button under all the key frames so that you can see your previous frames and know how to animate your stickman

Using this technique you can make your stick man do anything.

This is a lenghthy process so i would suggest you start off making short animations and then move onto longer ones. Most of the animation is done frame by frame as you will see in the final swf that there are some shape tweens but these need to be added at the right stage and properly tuned to create nice visuals.

Next i animated the stick man kicking the ball a few times, this was done by lenchthening and shortening the stick mans leg frame by frame.

Next the stick man morphs into flight this was also done using shape tweening and moving around the stickmans limbs

You can decide when and where in your animation you want to add shape tweens but dont over do it as it can mess things up as you can see in my swf whilst the ball is flying over, the stick man semi morphs twice and it doesnt look very pro at all so just use the shape tween when you have to.

finaly add a new layer with a blank key frame at the end of your animations time line and press F9 to enter the actionscript pannel

Type in the following to stop the animation once it has played to the end other wise it will carry on repeating like mine does.

Here is the final swf again note if your animation has not worked out exact to this one not to worry as it was not supposed to your should be better. Use your creativity with these basic techniques.

This tutorial was to teach you the basics or atleast one technique of stickman animations we will bring you more soon so do subscribe to our rss feed and stay tuned.

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