So far in the few animations I've done, I've faced a problem with keeping things separate in each scene.

For example, I will construct a character made out of various sub-parts (head, torso etc) and in scene one I might have the character walk to the left and look up. The result of this is that the character graphic and various child symbols within it all have key frames etc on their time lines, as you would expect. For example, on frame 10 the eye graphic within the character's head moves its pupil to look up.

Now in scene two I would really like to have a completely fresh copy of this entire character without any keyframes or anything on any of its timelines. Now of course, you can duplicate a symbol but the problem is that it doesn't duplicate any of the child symbols. So although I would have a new copy of my character, it would still be using the same head and eyes etc, which have already been animated to do things for scene 1.

Because of this, at the moment I have just been using the same character symbol for each scene, but carefully making sure the animations for the different scenes occur in separate places on the characters time line. So for scene two I will jump into the character at a particular frame e.g. 250, using the "First:" box in the symbol properties. For scene three I will have put my character onto the stage and jump in to the part of his timeline that corresponds to scene three (e.g. frame 425).

This works, but it's a bit messy and I feel like I might be doing things in a dumb and awkward way. For each scene I would really like to be able to reach into my "character box" and pull out a completely fresh, animation-free version of him.

Any ideas?