Animate a Flying Bird using Illustrator and Flash, Part 1

Looking forward to part 2.

[...] Jay Schuh - Animate a Bird in Illustrator - Part 1 [...]

Great job. Clear narration and nice pencils for the bird. Looking forward to part 2.

Jay…. GREAT stuff….

Hi Jay, your tutorial is starting out pretty good but, I have a question. Why use illustrator to do the tracing of the original drawings and then move them to Flash?

Some years ago I purchased some Flash tutorials from Justin at Cartoon Smart and one was on drawing in Flash. In the tutorial Justin brings a pencil sketch into Flash and starts out using shape fills and the selection tool to create a cartoon character from the sketch, at no time in the tutorial did he ever use the pen tool. All fills and strokes were manipulated using the selection tool and the ability to change a stroke to a fill made it easy to change the strokes shape by dragging them into position using the selection tool.

The process of shaping fills and strokes just using the selection tool in Flash seems to be easier than manipulating fills and strokes using the pen tool and the selection tools in Illustrator.

So not to confuse the people that are new to Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash, the pen tool is one of the most important tools that you want to learn and master.

Thanks
Scott Rudy

Hey Scott, thanks for the great feedback.

The short answer is that it is a workflow issue. I have been using Flash since about v2 and Illustrator (until lately) has always allowed me better control over the creation of my initial drawings. (NOTE: I edit the heck out of them once I get them into Flash)

Also from a practical stand point when I hire interns or art students to help in asset creation I have found it is easier to have them work in Illustrator then port their work over to Flash.

Just as there is more than one way to skin a “rat” (that is for the cat lovers out there) there is more than one way to create content for flash.

I totally agree about what you said about the pen tool. The pen tool is totally useful especially if you are dealing with Masks in just about any Adobe program! So the process has made myself and the folks that have worked with me really good at using the pen tool.

Thanks again for the feedback!

J.

hello, great video and just the example I am looking for. just want to thank you for the time u spendt on this. when is part 2 out?
And yes,. there are many different ways to do one thing in illustrator/photoshop etc. I dont mind watching how you did it!

[...] video tutorial demonstrates how to animate a flying bird using Adobe Illustrator and Flash. Part 1 goes over the process of creating the vector assets in Illustrator, Part 2 shows how to animate the [...]