First it must be agreed upon amount of money against amount of work time, amount of work, and deadlines.

It is usual to ask for a third right at signing the contract.

The usual way: making the stroke as large as possible with the width tool, then enlarging the whole layer.

Video is tricky. I can just guess where the problem lies. I have a project with imported AVI files right now which nicely exports to Quicktime - on a Mac. If you're working on Windows, the trouble could be caused by a faulty Quicktime installation, but this is just a wild guess. Have you tried to ch...

("wenn man nicht alles selber macht ..." *mutter*) I gave it a try myself, using your recipe of a stroke masking a colour fill layer. The .anme file should be self-explaining. http://www.slowtiger.de/examples/grastest1.anme http://www.slowtiger.de/examples/grastest1.mov http://www.slowtige...

It always amazes me how you guys are able to think in a completely different direction than I intended ... Must be my language, I think. When I said "animated watercolor stroke" I imagined something simple like a leaf of grass done with one brush stroke - and this leaf animated the usual w...

Although the examples looked nice, I wouldn't exactly use this effect for backgrounds - I'd do them on paper. I was more interested in getting an animated watercolor stroke. Think of moving underwater plants, or grass, or flying birds ...

Q.E.D.

*falls down backwards*

Wow. I never thought that things like this would even be possible in AS. It's great!

Now I wonder how this stroke will behave in animation ...

oh boy .... if you react like this at just a statement like "There isn't that much animation in it", I don't even want to imagine how you will react to detailed criticism.

At second thought, I wouldn't be interested much. There are many other people willing to learn and improve.

I can imagine several reasons, some common ones: 1. Did you really checked all timelines? There's that "Settings" button on top of the timeline palette. By default only some of the options are checked, in your case the opacity timeline matters. 2. If you accidentially set the image level i...

I guess your question is "How do I move the chin with the mouth when my character speaks?"

Easy. When you create the mouth shapes, just create the chin with it. For further reference, read part 5.1 of the manual (the "Help" entry in the menu).

I asked about Flash only because there's an issue with file sizes when importing animation from AS. In my current project bandwidth is precious, so I had to take care to export stuff from AS in a way that everything is converted to symbols nicely, which means I had cutout animation only. If you do a...

Anything I need for a job. I will not mention sound programs. For preparing artwork I use Photoshop. For editing video I use Final Cut. Flash for web animation. Mirage for bitmap animation.

Of course a statement like "this way is faster" has to be put in context. How often will the character be used, is it a one-shot or a series, and so on. I wonder about one thing: do you use Flash just as a production tool for doing the animation, or do you want to program the whole game in...

Hm ... it still would be faster to draw this by hand in Mirage ...