I have lightly dabbled with animation before and as such I have picked up on a few techniques already. I found them on the internet and found them very helpful with the animations I have attempted in the past.
Phonemes:
These are basically mouth shapes. This is very helpful for animating speech. In animation it is essential to record any speech before attempting to animate a scene. The speech is key to the feel, timing and technical aspects of the scene. If you animate before hand and make the actor try to speak along with the speed you have already determined it will be awful. As such, you record the speech then go in to animate. The easiest way to make it look realistic is with phonemes. These are basically pre-drawn mouth shapes. They are drawn representations of the shape the mouth makes when certain common sounds of speech are produced, for example A, E, O, TH, L those kinds of things. The idea is you make enough shapes to cover all your bases (and to be thorough draw them at multiple angles) then you can just drop them in your scene when they are requires. Here is an example of phonemes:
As you can see you don't need to draw many to be effective and they save an enormous amount of time in the long run. In flash in particular you can model your character then draw each mouth shape out in turn on separate keyframes. Then just place each phoneme in it's own symbol. You can then listen to the audio track in flash and when you hear a certain sound just drag in the corresponding mouth shape to the correct place on the face (for which you can use crosses and other similar markers to ensure each mouth is in the exact same spot each time). It is a very helpful and realistic tool. You can even create elaborate transitions if you wish to although that can be quite time consuming and isn't really required for simple animations. Simply placing the shapes one after another with no transition will suffice.
Onion Skinning:
Onion skinning is essential in hand drawn animation. It is used to see a reference for the previous frame(s). It is essential for movement and can even help in the placement of phonemes. It has been used for years from when everything was drawn by hand through to the modern day with there being a dedicated onion skin feature built into the timeline in Flash. This is an example of what onion skinning looks like:
This shows onion skinning in a very simple way. Animation is done using frames. You draw a sequence of images that could say, progress through a movement and then layer them one after the other and play them back at speed. Onion skinning allows you to see the previous frames without them being editable (or getting in the way). You can then see where the object was in the last frame and draw the next frame in a more natural position than using mere guess work. Getting to grips with the feature and learning how to use it effectively is utterly essential when dealing with any kind of motion.
Boiling:
This is a lesser known and lesser used feature in animation at a beginner level. It is the image jittering and moving slightly frame to frame. The outline of a character doesn't stay rock solid it instead moves and jumps around. This looks unnatural however, it is still used in some circles. Technological advances make it possible to eliminate boiling yet people go out of their way to include it. It all stems from when animators used to have to hand draw every single frame in the animation. No matter how good any given artist/animator is, it is impossible to exactly copy the previous frame. To get each line exactly where the last line lay. These subtle discrepancies in the drawings frame to frame cause the lines to look as though they are moving slightly throughout the video. This is known as boiling (because it looks as though the image is boiling and bubbling slightly).
Now the real way to achieve this effect is massively time consuming as you need to draw out each frame independently and one after the other. And in a 24fps video that can take a while. There is a cheat you can use on Flash that looks like quite realistic boiling but takes a fraction of the time. when you draw characters and key features you merely make them into a symbol. After that in the symbol view for the image you create a second frame in the timeline and make it a keyframe, then in the second frame select everything and smooth it using the smooth feature on the tool panel. This smooths all the lines and softens the edges creating a subtle movement in all the lines. Now when you place the symbol in a timeline with more than two frames it will loop the two subtly different frames over and over creating the illusion that the outline has been re-drawn through every frame. This is considered a cheat and is looked down upon by the more professional animators who still draw every frame. For beginner animators however, it is a godsend and a pretty effective/convincing feature to have in your toolset.
Now the real way to achieve this effect is massively time consuming as you need to draw out each frame independently and one after the other. And in a 24fps video that can take a while. There is a cheat you can use on Flash that looks like quite realistic boiling but takes a fraction of the time. when you draw characters and key features you merely make them into a symbol. After that in the symbol view for the image you create a second frame in the timeline and make it a keyframe, then in the second frame select everything and smooth it using the smooth feature on the tool panel. This smooths all the lines and softens the edges creating a subtle movement in all the lines. Now when you place the symbol in a timeline with more than two frames it will loop the two subtly different frames over and over creating the illusion that the outline has been re-drawn through every frame. This is considered a cheat and is looked down upon by the more professional animators who still draw every frame. For beginner animators however, it is a godsend and a pretty effective/convincing feature to have in your toolset.
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