Making your pitch more animated with Flash
Looking at the Flash timeline interface, you can see that it derives from traditional cel animation. You see layers, numbered frames, and what look like spreadsheet cells, analogous to the cels traditionally used to separate characters and scenery. 
In the traditional Disney and Warner Brothers style, characters are inked and painted onto celluloid, then photographed over an illustrated scene — frame by labor- intensive frame. Cels were see-through layers of celluloid that could provide individual control of different elements composed within a scene. Backgrounds were drawn as needed.
From Cels to Layers: Lifts and separates
In Flash animation, layers on the bottom usually hold a stationary background, while other layers above hold the pieces of action. Each plane, however, can serve several functions, moving a graphic along a path, revealing its content over time by taking away masking, playing audio, even holding the animator's production notes. Layers can be named, locked, and organized into folders. Keeping everything separate means greater freedom to build and edit a scene.24 Drawings per second? Not likely.
You could animate frame by frame in Flash, but I doubt anyone does. Cel animation means 24 hand-drawn and painted characters per second, a technique that can keep artists employed, but that few want to pay for any more. The closing of the last Disney 2D animation studio was the subject of a discussion on Slashdot.Creating animation with Flash has more in common with the stop motion paper cutouts of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam than it has with Bambi and Donald Duck. In these paper-puppet productions, one cutout drawing of an arm or head is used on camera throughout a scene, sliding and rotating between frames to create the action.
The character functions a lot like the flat pose-able scarecrows with the hinged limbs that you see taped to picture windows on Halloween. Flash's use of Symbols and Instances deftly exploits this idea of "one image throughout." Beyond sliding or rotating an image, you can have multiple copies of the same image on stage at one time, and change their properties of size, color, and transparency, all over time. In other words, you can create a snowstorm with one snowflake.
But it would be pretty tedious to create a layer for every snowflake and add randomness to its downward movement. For that sort of thing, you can use Flash's programming language, ActionScript. Here's a tutorial on ActionScripting snow.
From optical to digital: The art of motion
Flash allows you to incorporate traditional rules of thumb for animated motion. Like easing in and easing out on an action–that's slow to start, fast in the middle, slow to finish. Put a little stretch and squash to your objects during that action to give them a sense of weight and gravity response. These techniques, as the pros who defined and perfected them learned decades ago, are more felt than seen yet give the motion zest and punch. Most importantly, it will keep your animations from looking robotic and PowerPointy.Watch out for bitmaps
Most Flash images are vector drawings, meaning they're stored as instructions for drawing the screen rather than as bitmaps containing a set number of pixels. This means they can be scaled to any size and will still look crisp. In our work, we use a fair number of bitmaps, typically screens depicting a software interface. These images look their best at the size they were captured at, which is something that should be taken into account when you're planning to use them with a web page or PowerPoint presentation.— AC
About Us and 2-Minute Explainers
Business Information Graphics is a company run by MBAs and writers. We started the business because we saw a niche for a boutique firm providing a combination of strong B2B editorial services and multimedia. We like what we do: it's one interesting story after another. We like talking with people in sales and marketing, and we like the challenge of distilling what they tell us into a two minute message.Efficient and effective B2B communications since 1986
Business Information Graphics was founded in 1986 to provide editorial and graphic services for business-to-business communications. The founders, Bruce McKenzie and Lorna Pautzke, had both held a variety of marketing and communications positions at the world's largest paper company, International Paper. Persuaded that nearly all the marketing communication firms calling on them were more interested in creating award-winning graphic design than they were in producing effective day-to-day marketing communication, they formed Business Information Graphics to focus on producing marketing materials that would win customers for clients.Marketing Communication for IT
Most of our clients are in Information Technology, so there's always something new to write about. But (it seems to us, anyway) when IT companies write about themselves, it comes out sounding pretty bland. We came up with the idea of 2-Minute Explainers[link to 2me] in the course of researching prospects for our business - we often found that, after spending ten or fifteen minutes poring over company's website, we still had only a vague idea what was being sold and why a person would buy it. 2-Minute Explainers solve that problem nicelyDesktop publishing for B2B
Another interest was desktop publishing, which was just getting started with the introduction of the PostScript-powered Apple LaserWriter. The company bought its first copy of PowerPoint (at a New York Macintosh Users Group fair) before Microsoft bought PowerPoint (it was published by ForeThought of Sunnyvale, CA). We took on just about any project that required editorial, design and desktop publishing skills-from rewriting and formatting the strategic plan of a telecom logistics company to writing a book on desktop publishing for Hammermill Paper Company. We also created brochures, newsletters, executive presentations, packaging, videos-all the normal corporate and marketing communication items. When computer-based multimedia started becoming feasible for B2B communication (we were among the first authorized Macromedia developers, having started out with MacroMind VideoWorks), we began to focus more on multimedia, which takes advantage of Bruce McKenzie's radio-TV background and knack for writing things that sound good when spoken out loud. We created a number of interactive presentations for trade shows and new product introductions-kiosks and stand-up presentations, as well as the accompanying literature.Flash animations that make sense
As broadband Internet connections became the norm, we naturally gravitated to Flash, though we never liked those "Skip Intro" productions that so many businesses seemed to think were the ne plus ultra of a high-tech home page. We began packaging B2B value propositions as 2-Minute Explainers® in 2003. Originally just a shorthand way of describing our general approach to multimedia, the idea has become both a business process and an actual "product." The process (which requires that we get a thorough understanding of a company and product) often leads to other engagements. After all, once you've distilled something into two minutes of lucid prose and snappy graphics, it's not difficult to repurpose what you've done as a brochure, sellsheet or a set of web pages.Team
Bruce McKenzie writes and produces multimedia productions, brochures, books, articles, and videos. He is the author of The Hammermill Guide to Desktop Publishing in Business, as well as articles in various new media publications. He was a market development manager and creative services director at International Paper where he managed product development and advertising for the 2-billion fine papers business. He produced the first coast-to-coast cable broadcast of a video corporate annual report. He produced a number of award-winning corporate videos, including "The Price," an antitrust docudrama which was named best industrial video of the year at the Chicago Film Festival, and has been used in the antitrust education programs of many Fortune 500 companies. He holds master's degrees in broadcast journalism and business administration.
Lorna Pautzke looks at B-2-B business presentations with the discerning and skeptical eye of an industrial marketer and product manager, which she was, at International Paper, before helping to start up Business Information Graphics. Lorna developed pricing and service policies in a multimillion-dollar segment of IP's fine papers business. An MBA, with a concentration in marketing and market research, she sets and enforces high standards for research, editorial, and creative quality. She directs all aspects of production, from the definition of expectations and expected costs to on-time and on-budget delivery of the end product. She directs the activities of subcontractors and manages the costs to be sure that projects meet expectations and come in on time and on budget.
Anthony Coccia Director of Art & Animation, creates the original art and animation at Business Information Graphics. A graduate of the University of the Arts, in graphic design, he also attended the prestigious Yale Summer Program in Graphic Design in Brissago, Switzerland. There, he received instruction from such design leaders as Paul Rand and Armin Hofmann. Before joining the company, he worked in the creative department of Novartis Pharmaceuticals. At Business Information Graphics, Anthony's knack for animation was ideal for the emerging multimedia revolution. His motion graphics have captivated thousands in such venues as trade shows, online, and corporate films.