MAKING YOUR BLAMIMATION® HAPPEN

Part One: Laying Down Your Audio

Step 1. Record your skit. BLAMIMATIONS are fast and best watched in short doses, so don't let that thing run long! Keep your hilarious audio to two or three minutes. Save it as a WAV file.

Step 2. Get Flash! We'll be working with Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004. Can't find it anywhere? You can grab a copy of Flash Professional 8 for just $699!

Step 3. Create a new Flash document. Go to File > New... and select a Flash Document.

Step 4. Get familiar with some names for objects. The white square in the center is called the stage. That's the box inside which your BLAMIMATION will play.

Above, where it says "Layer 1," is the timeline panel. The numbers across the top show where the frames will go.

Step 5. Look at your blank keyframe. A keyframe is a special frame that says that something has changed about the animation. Although you can create regular frames to follow keyframes, you can only add objects, sounds and actions to keyframes.

Keyframes are marked by a little circle in the frame, on a given layer. This new document has a blank keyframe, which means there's nothing on the stage here.

Step 6. Add your skit audio. Go to File > Import to Library... and find your WAV file. Push Ctrl-L to look at your library. The library is a bank of all the objects you'll be creating -- don't forget it's there!

To add the audio to the layer, click the blank keyframe so it's highlighted. Then look at the properties panel below. (You can also find the properties panel through Window > Properties.) Click the little white triangle in the bottom right of the properties panel to open up more options.

In the Sound dropdown, select your skit audio that you imported to the library. In the Sync dropdown, change the audio sync type to Stream. This is important or your movie sounds and images might lose sync!

Step 7. Hit F5 a bunch of times. When you push F5 on a given layer -- in this case, our Layer 1 -- it adds frames after the closest keyframe. You should be able to see your audio waveform in the timeline now. Add a bunch of frames, man -- just add a ton of damn frames! Add as many as is needed to get to the end of your audio waveform.

Step 8. Create a new layer. We don't want to work inside Layer 1 anymore, because that's got audio in it. So right-click where it says "Layer 1" on the left side of the timeline, and Insert Layer. (You may want to name Layer 1 something like "Audio" so you can keep track -- you can rename layers by double-clicking their names.)


Part Two: Adding Some BLAMIMATION

Step 1. Just like any layer, your new layer can have frames and keyframes. In your first blank keyframe, use the Brush or Pen tool to draw some damn thing. It can be anything your imagination desires!

Step 2. Select the Selection Tool (by pressing V) or the Free Transform Tool (by pressing Q) and drag a box around all of your drawing. Then hit F8.

F8 converts your selected drawing into a symbol. Learn to love the symbol. You must understand the symbol. The symbol is a special object that is in your library. We're doing a simple BLAMIMATION, so select the Symbol Type to be a Graphic. Also, give the symbol a meaningful name, like "the_hideous_thing_i_just_drew."

Step 3. Now you've got a symbol. Let's pretend it looks like a character who's talking. Now here's the fundamental concept behind the BLAMIMATION.

You can hit Enter at any time to hear the audio at this point on the timeline. A little vertical line will show you the exact point you're listening to. Listen for the part where this character is supposed to be talking. (It'll probably coincide with a little blob on the waveform in the audio layer, Layer 1.) If your keyframe, with your symbol in it, is in line with that blob on the audio layer, then that character will be onscreen when that audio plays.

You can drag your keyframe with the symbol in it to this point on the same layer. Try it! But don't move it to the audio layer! Just straight across. Yeah, that's it.

Don't forget to add frames after this keyframe by pushing F5. Otherwise, your drawing will just disappear after its layer's frames run out. Frames tell the animation to keep the last keyframe on the screen longer.

Step 4. So let's say your audio changes after a while so it's not this character talking, but his friend. You want to change the symbol on the stage to something else. Here's how!

Step 5. On the frame on his layer where someone else starts talking, right-click, and select Insert Blank Keyframe. Bam! Your symbol is still on the preceding frames (and keyframe), but here you have a new blank to work in.

Now you can repeat Step 1! Make a new drawing and convert it to a new symbol! Call it a different name, of course.

Also, remember that if you've made symbols, they appear in the library. So if you wanted to bring your first character back in, you'd just have to make a blank keyframe for him, make sure you're working in that blank keyframe, and drag him from the library to the stage. It's easy!

You can use the Free Transform Tool to resize the symbols on the stage. (This doesn't affect the versions of the symbol in the library.)

Step DONE. That's honestly pretty much the meat of it. You can see this at work in the first PvP BLAMIMATION. And I mean, that was pretty good, right? You can find out how to do motion tweening, loading screens and multiple scenes at many websites, but I find the most comprehensive is FlashKit.com. Try their Tutorials!

It's actually pretty easy. Scott never used Flash before and he had it down in like a couple hours. So if you take more than a few hours to get it, man, just give up forever.

HEY BLAMIMATORS! Include this official button somewhere in your BLAMIMATION! Resize it to fit if you like.

And remember, if you have any questions at all, go look it up on the internet! I'm not a babysitter.