Creating The Character In Flash CS3

The first thing that I needed to do was to draw the character (Robot) on the Flash Interface, to do this properly I needed to draw one part at a time and save it as a Movie Clip so that it could be easily reused and animated at a later stage, also each body part of the Robot was made on a different layer this allowed for more flexibility and was easier to see which layers were what.

Shown below is the process of the drawn body being turned into a movie clip,

First of all, everything needs to be selected by pressing CTRL + A (whilst all other layers are locked) this will select everything on the current working layer, with this done go to Modify > Convert To Symbol (F8) and it will bring up the below menu asking for a name, and asset type when done click OK and it will be then saved in the Library window on the right hand side, where it can be dragged onto the main scene whenever another of that movie clip is needed.

Drawing



Convert To Symbol Menu



Library



Once all of the body parts of the Robot had been made and saved as individual video clips I had the result that is shown below:



Now that I had all of these I could create the background which was a simple use of rectangles filled with the appropriate colours, and could move on to the ActionScript and animation.