This is a small animation I did in 2003 for Entib Isolation. I used java to program the animation with all the 3D objects including the text and the laser beam. For each frame, the objects were rendered on a 2D plane with flat shading. The obtained polygons were compressed (merging and deleting some points) and saved to a vector file.
I then used Ming, within a C program, to replay the animation and to output it to a flash (swf) file. I found Ming very powerful for creating flash files. Moreover, it is open source.