Desinging and Animating Cankerworms with Adobe Flash

This here is a good example of what you can do with only some oval shapes, lines, and a few Flash knowledge. In order to create the cankerworm, we need just few things to draw: an oval of the body with a pair of legs that move, and two instances of the face.

First thing we will discuss is how to create the body, so we will discuss one of the four identical Movie Clips. These here is the Timeline arrangement of this Clip.

We have three layers, the first and last with the legs, and the middle one with the oval shape. First thing we did when we designed this was the oval. We also colored it with a green radial gradient. We converted into a Movie Clip and did a bit of motion, left to upper right and back. For the legs we used a line curved at one end, placed inside a Movie Clip. We rotated the legs around the upper end, at the same time we moved the body, so now we have an oval shape with legs, which moves.

For the head, we did the same motion as in the case of the Clips that create the body. But inside the Clip we moved, we placed on different layers and frames, two instances of the face. If you look at the picture above, you shouldn't have any trouble in creating that.

The real trick in all this is how we made the cankerworm move. This is in fact very simple, because it's a question of how we arranged all the elements we spoke about. The idea is to create a delay between the 5 parts that have to move, starting with the head (right to left), and we did that by placing all the Clips on different layers but starting from a different point in time.

Now the cankerworm looks like this.

Using the same technique we animated a dragon-fly. Check it out in the Bonus Effects section.

The only thing you need to do now is to move the main Clip (with the cankerworm) slowly to the right, and the result should be something like the first animation of this section. So remember that creating great things with little knowledge but with a cool idea is very much possible. Enjoy!