Set your movie properties.

Then I started the first scene by simply sketching out very roughly with the wacom everything that appears on the screen when the animation starts. I like to use a funny color such as pink (or any color I have no intention of really including in the final movie) for this step so that later on I can easily tell apart what’s my rough and what’s my clean. Now I change the layer into a Sketch Layer so it won’t appear when I publish to SWF. And start building up everything on separate layers. Now that Flash MX lets you add Layer Folders you can really let yourself loose and work with lots of them (layers) while keeping your Timeline comprehensive.Now comes the time to really start thinking about the concept of nested symbols that I hinted before. Symbols within symbols within symbols, that is. Simply put, everything that shall move together should be made into a single symbol so that it’ll be easy to move about on the screen without having to worry about several layers matching together. But, for example, if you’ve got a head and want to have the eyes blinking and the mouth talking while everything goes up’n down, you might want to turn those into symbols to. And if you’ve got a blinking eyes cycle, it quite possible that the character might have similar pupil in both eyes... witch you might as well be a single graphic symbol duplicated. You get the picture. If the body part you’re about to make into a symbol is going to somewhat turn about, make sure the pivot point of your symbol is located over the fix part of the body. For example, the pivot point of an arm should be over the shoulder. Body parts (or other objects for that matter) will be easier to rotate that way without requiring further translation every time.And for the record, when you’re working on a cartoon, make every symbol a graphic symbol. Movie clip and Buttons are good for interactive websites and games... but not animation. If you forget that, I wish you never have to publish your animation as a Quicktime document, or Avi, or image sequence... you’ll wish you hadn’t.