Adobe Flash Animation Timeline

I want to create a movie with Adobe Flash CS5. Now I have a little experience with flash, but I'm wondering what should be the best approach to create the movie. So I have created all my art in Illustrator and loaded it into Flash, so there are a lot of objects.

Should I:

• Make a movieclip of every object I want to animate and animate everything on the main timeline? Seems not the best option to me since you get a lot of frames when you have a big movie.

Or should I:

• Make little animations ready inside movieclips. E.G: I have a character, I split up his body parts and animate each body part nested in a movieclip. Problem here is, that I want to call certain animations only when I need them. So I have the character walk, nod, jump or fall, for example. I do not want this to loop constantly, but to call the animations only when needed. Is this possible?

I'll tell you the convention we use at my company, but understand that there are other ways of doing the same thing - and that those other ways are just as valid, depending on the project. This is something you're going to have to decide for yourself.

Granted, we make educational software, so we have to factor in things that you won't need to: GUI, interactive elements, etc.

In general, each "scene" is a MovieClip. This is not the same as a Flash "Scene": I don't recommend those, as they're buggy. Inside each MovieClip we have a background image layer, a sound layer (makes life easier), and a layer for each individual character.

The timeline for a given scene is fairly long, containing various "cues" (ambient, a particular line, etc.) These cues are easy to write in a game, but they may be harder for you. We give a name to the first frame of each cue.

At the top of the layer stack in each MovieClip is a dedicated SCRIPT layer, which we use to move between the cues. At the end frame of one "cue", we jump to the next cue we want, with gotoAndPlay("nameOfCue"); This isn't entirely linear for us, in that we may need different cues at different times, depending on the player actions.

For each of those cues, you will animate the characters as desired. You do not want to have a "nod" cue that you use over and over, as this makes the character wooden. There are no shortcuts here. Treat them like actors in a live-action movie. Instead of filming the hero nodding, and using that film every time the script calls for him to nod, you will have him nod anew every time a nod is called for. Animation is time consuming, but well worth the outcome.

Again, our particular methods are the ones that work for us. You're going to have to decide for yourself what you want. It might work better for you to ditch the whole idea of "cues" and animate each "scene" in a linear, start-to-finish fashion.