As you work on creating your own animation, here are a few things you need to remember.

HAVE A GOOD IDEA. Come up with some kind of story that you’re going to tell or something you’re going to explain or some purpose you’re going to achieve. Nothing ruins an animation more than having it just be random, pointless motion. Our previous exercise was random and pointless, just to practice the tools. Now, you’re applying those tools and creating something worthwhile! It doesn’t have to be super long or complicated, just something that makes sense and is interesting.

The larger your stage, the bigger the file.
The more frames you have per second, the bigger the file.
If you use bitmap/raster images, instead of vector images, your file will be bigger.
So?….
A bigger file will load slower on the internet, and nobody likes a slow, laggy file.
So….
Keep your files small if you can, but don’t sacrifice quality in the name of speed. (make it good and not really tiny.)

When you work on your Flash file, the file format will be .fla – these are the editable files
When you PUBLISH your Flash file, the file format will be .swf – these are the ones that can be read by a browser on the internet.

Your animation can work in different directions, with pauses, changes to something new, etc. All we did in our last exercise was to move the ball from one side to the other, but we could have had it pause, change direction, or we could have added a new symbol to replace the ball at some point.