Help! Newbie to Animation!

Welcome to the AWN Forums LadyIridal.

There are several cheap to free animation programs that you can get and are fairly easy to use. One is Plastic Animation Paper http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/

DigiCel FlipBook is also a good one. http://www.digicelinc.com/

There are a few others, but I can't think of them at the moment. These are pretty basic but are enough to get you started on learning the basics of animation.

Good Luck.

Aloha,
the Ape

I am very new to animation, infact, I haven't really completed an animation short before. Problem is, I don't have an animation program besides Adobe ImageReady which I can barely use.
I would very much appreciate any pointers where I can get what animation programs that are fairly easy to use. Then, I can finally prepare for animation school in college!

Do you plan on drawing your animation on paper or drawing with a Wacom tablet ?

Here are some programs that I have used and think are worth checking out (except I've never personally used MonkeyJam, but I've heard it's pretty good and it's FREE which is hard to beat, price-wise )

Wacom Tablet (or Paper) - TVPaint (Mac or Windows) TVPaint also lets you capture drawings by video or scanner , but it's main purpose is to let you animate paperlessly with a Wacom tablet, drawing directly into the program.

Wacom Tablet - Plastic Animation Paper (PAP is officially for Windows only, but a Mac beta version exists and the official Mac version is not far from being released , so I'm told. PAP is pretty good, but not as good as TVPaint , in my opinion.

Paper - use DigiCel Flipbook (Mac or Windows) or Toki Line Test (Mac or Windows) , or MonkeyJam (Windows only) to capture your drawings to view them as movies.

Keep in mind that TVPaint and Digicel Flipbook are also digital Ink & Paint programs for coloring your final drawings , in addition to pencil testing your initial rough animation. Toki Line Test and MonkeyJam are only meant for pencil testing, no color.

Oh, yeah, unless I forget , I've been trying out the demo of ToonBoom Studio 4.0 (recently released) and it's pretty good. You can scan paper drawings and import them into ToonBoom Studio or you can draw directly into the program using a Wacom tablet . The drawing tools are not nearly as sensitive as TVPaint or PAP , but are ok , if you don't mind drawing with vectors which "tweak" your line a bit as you put it down . I don't like a program which tries to correct my line as I draw, so I'm not a fan of drawing frame-by-frame animation in ToonBoom or Flash , and prefer TVPaint where the program faithfully reproduces the line I draw .

Have you ever made a paper flipbook?

I'd recommend finding an early version of Flash on Ebay. I got started with Flash 3, which I don't think you can find anymore...but Flash 4 versions should still be available. Or even Flash 5, it was a great version.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Macromedia-Flash-5-Software-Look-NR_W0QQitemZ280155686258QQihZ018QQcategoryZ80315QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I thought it may be worth mentioning that Toonboom recently released a Personal Learning Edition (PLE) which is free to download, and fully functional. It does put an ugly watermark on anything you export, but other than that I've found it to be a good tool for learning with.

PAP is excellent (for the price), but at least the last time I used it it was still a little buggy. It's simplicity is very helpful for focusing on animating rather than overloading on features that the other programs have. If you don't mind working around a few minor issues, and are willing to save frequently it works quite nicely (as long as you have a tablet).

Regards,
Matt