Conan Sinclair is back with another fantastic "tradigital" themed animation tutorial. Like his past two lessons, this one focuses on traditional animation skills using digital tools. His preference is to use Flash for animation, but you could work with any program, such as Toon Boom Animate or Toon Boom Studio.

In this tutorial, Conan goes beyond the fundamentals that were already taught in his previous tutorials, and now focuses on a multi-scene fight animation. Below is the outline of what you can expect to learn...

Part 1 - Setting up the Scene: Conan explains how important it is to begin with model sheets, an environment and storyboard before beginning to actually animate. Those assets are included along with source files throughout the rest of the tutorial. This part mostly focuses on setting up the stage with some initial animation of each character during the pan-in.

Part 2 - Building Suspense: No fight sequence would be complete without some initial "showboating" of each opponent's skills. In this part Conan animates the Big Brute's "bring it on" style fist clap and the Little Dude's sequence of martial arts flare.

Part 3 - Punching and Running: In this lesson, the two key sequences are the Little Dude running to attack and the Big Brute sending a direct punch toward the camera. This part has some great examples of "smear", similar to motion blur, but done by actually drawing in a smear of motion to the frame.

Part 4 - The Fight is on: Kick, block, deflect, punch, there's a little of everything in this part.

Part 5 - Clean Up and Compiling the Finished Scenes: This lesson covers coloring the rough frames, then exporting PNG sequences to be compiled into a non-linear video editing program for a little extra sizzle. Conan uses After Effects, but you can edit together the finished scenes in the program of your choice. He'll also teach how to add some effects to make the entire piece look less like it was made in Flash.

As usual, source files are included in every lesson.