Examples

This animation is made from three main parts. The background, the body and the legs. The way this was made was first I drew a sketch of this character and imported ths sketch into the program. Then I used the bezier pen tool to draw around the sketch to create nice curves.

Step 1
Draw a sketch of your characters on paper and scan them in. (You don't have to do this, but some people find it easier to work this way.) Next use the bezier pen tool to draw around the different coloured areas of the sketch. A useful tip is to set your sketch semi-transparent so you can overlay it over the parts you've done. Use the layer menu to swap the layers around.

Step 2
After you've finished one part, for example the body, select everything and group it into its own movieclip.

Step 3
Once you've got your main parts of the animation arange them how you want them for Frame 1. Move the pivot points of parts into the correct places. These are the points that your parts will rotate around.

Step 4
Move to frame 8 (the animation is initially set for 24 frames per second) and rotate your parts into the new positions.

Step 5
Move to frame 15 and rotate your parts back near to the original positions.

Step 6
Now preview your animation in your web browser.

Step 7, 8, 9....
Now let your creativity go wild. How about adding music? What about background animations. Text?

The whole animation saves as a Flash (SWF) file as just 17kb.