Whether you are a designer who hasn’t yet used Flash, a professional animator who wants to create digital animation for the first time, or a Flash user who hasn’t yet made the most of the animation features this book will show you how to bring your ideas to life.

Get to grips with Flash and bring inspiration to your work using Alex Michael’s easy to understand approach, demonstrating a wide selection of animation styles from a range of artists, along with key tips and tricks from the professionals.

* Create professional animations and discover the capabilities of Flash with this comprehensive guide
* Stay ahead - learning from a professional developers coverage of animation techniques
* Take advantage of free files on the accompanying CD-ROM allowing you to put into practice everything learnt in the book - a great quick way to learn!

If you want to learn how to do quality, professional animation using the Flash environment then this is the book for you. Whether you are a designer who hasnt yet used Flash, a professional animator who wants to create digital animation for the first time, or a Flash user who hasnt yet made the most of the animation features in Flash this book will show you how.

The easy to understand, clear and informative approach, illustrated throughout in full color, with a wide selection of different animation styles from a range of artists, along with key tips and tricks from the professionals, will allow you to get to grips with Flash and bring inspiration to your work.

Fully updated covering all the latest tools, features and techniques included in Flash 8 - such as ’Interactive Mobile Device Development’ which allows users to build content once and test it on a wide variety of mobile phones and’Higher-quality Video Codec’ providing superior video quality, competitive with today’s best video applications at a much smaller file size. This book will be an essential tool to achieve a comprehensive understanding and superior results!

* Discover the capabilities of Flash and create professional animations with this comprehensive guide
* Stay ahead learning from a professional developers coverage of animation techniques
* Take advantage of free files on the associated website allowing you to put into practice everything learnt in the book a great quick way to learn

Should have spent my money on something else
If your goal is to learn how to animate using Flash 8 this is not the book for you. If you have an interest in how computer animation is drawn, but not actually performing the tasks yourself, perhaps this book has some value. The author does talk about things such as how the mouth moves when saying different letters of the alphabet. Unfortunately, there’s no tutorial on how to actually do it yourself.

Do yourself a favor and read the first chapter at a book store, you will quickly see how the instructions are useless. The files that are included are either already completed or don’t include the necessary files/assests to complete the tasks.

What I was looking for was a book that would have activities that would demonstrate, through step-by-step tutorials, how to animate a cartoon character much like the one on the cover of the book. That didn’t happen.

I spent five minutes in a book store leafing through the book and at first glance it seemed promising. I was wrong. Look elsewhere.

I want my money back
I am stuck in chapter 1 of this book. I have read through the instructions countless times, trying to make sense of the steps. I have compared the instructions to the completed project ... and there seems to be no correlation. The pictures display things that we haven’t created yet. The references are largely incorrect.

For example ... the very first instruction is to open the existing file called man.fla. Upon opening that file, we find the project is completely finished. I’m pretty sure that was a mistake, so I create a new file and move on. The next instruction is to create a new graphic symbol called "man". But from that point on, the author refers to the graphic symbol called "walk" ... which I’m pretty sure is a reference to the "man" symbol, since we were never instructed to create a "walk" symbol. The picture also indicates that we are still working within the "man" symbol.

From here we start building symbols within symbols ... while it is never clear what each symbol should contain, or where it is nested, or even what it is called. We build a "legs" symbol, and then duplicate it twice for the "front leg" and the "back leg", after which there is no instance of the "legs" symbol on the stage. And then, all of a sudden, our "front leg" and "back leg" appear inside the "legs" symbol.

Pictures meant to clarify the steps are even more confusing, as they are clearly taken after the animation is complete. There are obvious tweens displayed, while we are still building our body parts.

I am comfortable with Flash already. I know how to make a symbol, and nest symbols within symbols. I know about layers and guide layers and stacking order. Keyframes and tweens are not new to me. I just wanted to learn some of the tips and tricks that the pros use in animation.

I’m ready to give up on chapter one ... and am hoping to find something of value in some of the remaining chapters. But if this first chapter is any indication of the author’s ability to describe things, I’m not real optimistic. Maybe he is one of the best professional animators in the business, but he should have hired a professional writer to help him author this book.

If you decide to buy this book, spend some time in chapter one before opening the CD case in the back and copying the files to your computer. You don’t need those files (since that first instruction to open man.fla is incorrect) ... and once you open the CD case, you can’t return the book for your money back. And I’m pretty sure that you WILL want your money back.

I would have given this book a rating of 0 stars if I had been allowed to. 1 star is a compliment that it doesn’t deserve.

Great Front Cover
Flash itself is so fascinating and has such potential for creativity that one expects any Flash book to embrace and impart that excitement. This effort was extremely dull and the book fails to demonstrate or excite any spark of imagination. It is no exaggeration to say that the most interesting part of the book was its front cover.

Alex Michael shares his experience, insight, tips and techniques
Alex Michael is lead animator and managing director for Sprite Interactive Ltd., UK. In this book, he shares his professional experience, insight, tips and techniques for animating with Flash 8. He covers many aspects of animation from storyboards at the planning stage to exporting your finished Flash movie. He uses several finished Flash project files included on the book’s CD to support his discussion of each topic area.

As an introduction to animation in the first chapter, he shows you how to create a basic walk cycle and teaches basic principles which you then can apply to anything you wish to animate. From here, he discusses each aspect of creative animation in detail. He begins with the planning stage and discusses how he applies traditional planning and storyboards to Flash animation. Next, he covers design methods and shares several tips to help simplify this part of the process.

Realistic character animation is a challenge and Michael shares his hard-earned knowledge for drawing and posing characters to create realistic movement. He shows how facial animation and lip syncing can be broken down into eight basic mouth expressions.

After these basics are covered, Michael moves on to sound. By examining project files from the book’s CD, he demonstrates how to use the Flash Sound Object, how to add sound along the Flash Timeline and how to control sound with ActionScript.

Characters are not the only objects that can be animated and Michael shows you how to animate text using another software program called SWISH. He also discusses several aspects of text animation including design decisions for choosing the correct text font for animation.

Flash Lite 2 and creating animation for mobile devices is the next topic area. Michael covers several decisions specific to mobile devices such as interface design and movie size. On the CD, you will find two complete sample projects that you can study by examining the source code.

With the addition of the Flash for Video (FLV) file format, you can create Flash animation for television and video. Michael discusses the different techniques he uses to create Flash video and includes a short tutorial to show how to output video from Flash. He then moves on to more advanced topics such as creating special effects with Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects and working with Flash media servers for streaming video.

Animation and 3D graphics is becoming very popular and Michael discusses two methods for adding 3D animation to the Flash environment. He first covers adding previously rendered 3D animation which has been created in one of the popular 3D software to your Flash movie and then how to create 3D effects within Flash with ActionScript.

The last chapter is a compilation of tips and tricks for animation production, the Flash application and ActionScript. You will also find a showcase of websites containing good examples of Flash animation and games.

Half the instructions is missing
If the instruction in chapter one-the tutorial for the walk cycle is what the rest of the the book is like, then I have wasted my money!
If I didn’t know Flash and had not already completed several walk cycles, I would not have a clue on what the author is trying to describe. He makes reference to objects that don’t exist. Part of the writing seems like it was written for something else. The instruction on creating symbols and building elements within the symbol is ridiculous. If I had not already understood how to build nested symbols, I certainly would not have learned from this book.

The book does haves some nice examples and references to professional flash work, but that’s about it. It has given me a serious headache

I am hoping the remaining chapters are much, much better. I can only hope.

Thoroughly Disappointing
The number of books out there dedicated to using Flash as an animation medium can be counted on one hand, and most of those aren’t very good. Despite the title, this book doesn’t really qualify as an animation book.

Much of the book covers non-animation topics like typography and video while animation topics like anticipation get less page space than the history of True Type fonts or noting when Nintendo added the Power Pad to its NES bundle.Even the off-topic of creating Flash content for mobile phones, which seems to be author’s area of expertise, doesn’t get covered very well.

There’s also an abundance of typos, clunky wordings and out of date text apparently copied from previous versions.

All in all, I’m very angry I spent $30 for such a poor book.