2D Animation

[scarylarrywolf]

I have a great concept for a short song I want to combine with a cartoon, but I really haven't done too much 2D animation. I've made some kinda detailed flip books (in high school math books) and done some clay animation, but are there any computer programs out there that anyone knows about that could help the process a little?

 

[Boober_Gorg]

I have a great concept for a short song I want to combine with a cartoon, but I really haven't done too much 2D animation.

You mean 2D hand-drawn or 2D Flash?

 

[scarylarrywolf]

Well, I'm not really familiar with flash, but is it incredibly difficult to catch onto? I feel more confident free-hand drawing, but I'd like to get into Flash too.

 

[leliebel]

I've done an animation with photoshop moving the layers around and changing them. Then I save alle the seperate gif files and put them in an animated gif. Later I added the music in adobe premiere at school.

Are you sure you don't want to use stop motion?

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I used to do a lot of 2D animation on computer from freehand drawings when I worked as an assistant animator. We used Macromedia Director (a companion product to Flash) which is probably too expensive and has more features than you need anyways.

Flash is great, but can be pretty difficult to learn if you're not familiar with animation software or scripting languages and also very expensive. You might want to look at Swish. It's basically a stripped-down, very user friendly Flash like program that produces flash animation in the .swf (flash) file format. I use it instead of Flash because I can't afford Flash and for it's price Swish is very versatile.

Right now I'm using Swish 2.0 but the more recent Swish Max has more features available. It can be bought online for $20-100 depending on the version and features you want.There's more info (and a free trial) available at http://www.swishzone.com

I hope that helps!

 

[FishHead]

animation software

Try some of the programs on this page.

http://www.clayanimator.com/english/clay_animation_software.html

 

[mimse]

I have a great concept for a short song I want to combine with a cartoon, but I really haven't done too much 2D animation. I've made some kinda detailed flip books (in high school math books) and done some clay animation, but are there any computer programs out there that anyone knows about that could help the process a little?

Hey you should try using Plastic Animation Paper (PAP). It's very much like traditional analog animation, but done on the computer. . . it's fanstastic. You can download a shareware version on http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk to try the program, but if you whants to get serius buy the PAP:Broadcast version and get all the features.

 

[Mr.Penguin]

How can you get flash? I have character designs and plenty of ideas, but no way of animating it. And my friend Mike is interested too.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

You can download a 30 day trial of Flash from http://www.macromedia.com and also buy the program online there.

 

[CB Boy]

I'd try Swish and if yer really in to then go to Flash. Swish is cheap and easy to use. Flash is expensive and hard.