Hello there! I have experience in flash through art classes in school, and Being a 16 year old on a low budget, I was curious if there were any flash like programs out there for free? I know free is pushing it lol... but Im desperate and my creative imagination needs to be released. I'm just looking for something that has the basic feel and capabilities of flash. Im looking for something that will be vector based, will animate, and will allow sounds to be added into the background! Any information would be awesomely appreciated! Thanks much!

1.What is animation?
2.What is weight?
3.Body machenics acting in animation describe.
4.Whats the difference between follow through and secondary action?

-feedback by ashish sharma

As far as I know there are no free flash-style programs, but you may be interested in Inkscape. It's only for graphics and not animations but it's similiar to flash in drawing and you could do an animated gif if it was little animation.

You can learn SVG by using the free tutorials given on the web and by reading the W3C SVG specification. SVG allows animating the specific path/shape/element. Currently, only Opera supports it (I think), but Mozilla is planning to add more SVG support in the near future (I think).

I came across a program called Synfig poking around a bit. http://synfig.org/Main_Page It seems to have versions for most operating systems. It is in development still however.

For OS X and Linux there is Pencil. http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php?id=Home

Perhaps one of those will be what you are looking for.