EDIT 2-20-12: I posted my new flash and it got front page and daily feature! SWEEEEEEET. I'll make an extended post when i can submit one to front page again.

EDIT 2-15-2012: Okay, finished the intermediate animation. Now on to the lip-syncing. We're getting close, you guys! I'm going to try to submit it on wednesday, AT THE EARLIEST. Also my series finally has a wikia page! Check it out!

I love the Newgrounds redesign. It's so...sexy. And functional. Everything is so much easier to use and learn how to use. Not so keen on the new backdrops though...it feels a little too specialized.

Here's my highly efficient animation process in case anyone wants some pointers:

1. Dialogue and Important Sounds: Okay this isn't really a part of the animation, but it's the first thing you should do. Import the sounds and dialogue into your flash and spread them out so it sounds good. This also includes music.

2. Basic Animation: The first steps of animating any movie for me is composing the shots and laying out the pieces of the characters into extreme poses, working with the dialogue, sounds, and music. This includes camera movement and large 'tweens as well. By the time you're done this it should look like a slide show of your movie with voice-overs.

3. Intermediate Animation: After I finish the basic animation I work on adding frame-by-frame animation between the extreme poses I laid out before. I also work on smaller tweens and facial animation. This should help the characters' movements look much less jerky and half-assed. By now it should look like a respectable animation but the characters look kind of slack-jawed while they talk. We'll fix that.

4. Lip-Syncing Animation: Depending on how lazy you are, lip-syncing could be the most laborious, time-consuming thing ever or the easiest and fastest part of this whole process. The way I see it there are two ways to do it:
a. go through the animation frame-by-frame and add specific mouth shapes to each sound they make, the longer process (which is what I prefer)
b. make a universal movie clip of the character's lips flapping in a 'watermelon watermelon watermelon' pattern. This is what I call the "Industrial Foamy" approach.

If you chose A, good for you. You're awesome and you care about your work. If you chose B, you're lazy scum.

Hope you enjoyed this small tutorial, you beginners!