Jackie--thank you very much for your feedback and for also providing those links. Definitely helpful. The second link with making use of states to create different animation effects is very cool!! Look forward to playing around with it.
Creating animations within Flash and then importing them into Storyline is something I should maybe consider more... I had previously disregarded the idea since it would result in a file that wouldn't export as HTML5. This isn't a big concern for the majority of stuff I'm doing right now, as none of it is typically viewed on mobile, but I had wanted to be trying to build somewhat 'future-proof' content incase that changes. I'm going to play around with even trying to convert an SWF to a non-Flash video file type that is HTML5 friendly (i.e. mp4) and see how that works.
Prior to this I also hadn't ever considered that I could create something in After Effects to produce a video clip that could be put into Storyline... the wheels are turning now!