I need help animating backgrounds

[Deathzone]

i'm prtty sure i figured out how to do character animations. but it seems like all my animations never have fully animated backgrounds. I wondered if there were some techniques or if there were specific ways to do this. if anyone knows please tell me.

also i do not know what it's called, but i also need the anime speed line effect technique

[RiotFlash]

At 7/24/07 10:55 PM, Deathzone wrote: i also need the anime speed line effect technique

I need a girlfriend. Let's call it even.

[Aeonstars]

hmm, don't you see? the secret to getting a girlfriend is correctly animating a background!

[Deathzone]

Lmao you guys are silly man, but really can you help me?

[Aeonstars]

Ok, well.. For the line trick thing, I don't know what to tell you. experiment. see what works. It's very easy to make it look bad but once you've made a solid loop of lines dashing by the screen and it doesn't look half bad, you're in the clear. Making your backgrounds more alive, well... Make sure to have a few layers. The last thing you want is everything stuck on the same layer. Just have movieclips of people or animals moving. It's not that hard. Also, a lot of flash artists blur their backgrounds a little for a far away look. This can be done by clicking your symbol, opening up the bottom box and choosing filters > blur. Don't let the blurring power go to your head though or before you know it, your flash looks like it could've been made by your 5 year old son in art class. good luck!

[Deathzone]

forgot to mention i have flash mx (6)
but yeah i know i need to divide it up on layers i do that on characters so your pretty much telling me backgrounds are animated the same way characters are right?

[cheshirepus]

Backgrounds are generally just static images that are occasionally panned across the stage if there's to be any motion applied to them at all. With Flash especially, animating a BG wastes valuable processing power and diminishes the quality of your overall movie. In that effect, your BG should exist by itself on the lowest layer as a graphic or (unanimated) movie clip. No extra layers or anything.
For the speed lines however, and only because it should be nothing more than a simple looping animation, you could easily nest a FBF movie clip inside one of your backgrounds and use it that way.
If you're wondering how to do it, take a closer look at one of the cartoons you're trying to emulate. On the Japanese ones, they're especially simplified to what looks like maybe a two or three frame loop done on two's.
Hope that helps a little... but to reiterate, BG's should, for the most part, be simple, STATIC images with a lot of time spent on detail.