Planning Your Movie

One of the most important steps in using Flash, and one probably most often overlooked by novice developers, is the idea of planning your animation before you start creating it.

You've probably heard of the concepts of "storyboarding" or "flowcharting" - professional video producers and programmers rely on these processes to minimize development time and the chances having to redo their work or running into a dead end.

Working in Flash is no different: having a plan laid out in advance is extremely helpful in making your development as fast and enjoyable as possible.

The questions you should ask yourself before starting your animation are: how long should the movie be? What are the key action points, and what graphics are involved in each? How will the action of the movie be controlled? Do you want to synchronize your movie with sounds or music? Once you've thought about these questions you may want to draw out a rough storyboard of the animation for later reference.

In the practice session, you can use the Timeline of the completed movie as a guide. You may want to keep this web page open to refer to as you work in Flash.