So you want to start an anime? Newbie guide to animation

[Adam]

Tutorials Updated 9/23/11

Behind the Animation 1: Tools - http://azureprostudios.com/Blog/2011/behind-the-animations-1-tools/
An introduction to the most common tools used when working with animation.

Behind the Animation 2: Welcome to Adobe Flash (CS4)- http://azureprostudios.com/Blog/2011/behind-the-animation-2-welcome-to-adobe-flash-cs4/
In this video I go over the basic layout of Flash. Where the tools are, what they do, how to fix that muffled sound you may get when you export a swf with audio and more basic information.

Behind the Animation 3: Frames from Start to Finish - http://azureprostudios.com/Blog/2011/behind-the-animation-3-frames-from-start-to-finish/
In this 27 minute video you see the process of sketching out concept frames all the way to the final colored version.

The next tutorial will focus on starting the animation, making simple motion tweens and shape manipulation.



Resources Updated 11/09/09


3 particle resources.

Click here (http://www.azure-productions.com/ap_tutorials.zip)

Included:

Snow fall (Created by me using AS 2, the following 2 are resources I picked up. I created some rain ones, but these are much better than the ones I made.)

Rain
Fireworks


Tutorials



So you have this idea for an awesome story and you don’t want to make an audio production. And you really don’t like the idea of a static comic so you decide to go for animation!

Hurray, you’ve chosen a creative outlet that entertains many and gives new meaning to your creativity, but wait, you don’t know how to animate. =/
And this is the beginning of those “I need an animator” threads, where you probably get little to no responses. Before we go into some detail on how to start animating, I wanted to touch on this a little.

The reason you get very little responses to your threads isn’t because no one likes you because you have leprosy. It’s usually because animators have their own creative ideas and decided to take up the pen and or mouse to bring it to life. Because of this they won’t have time to get involved in projects that seem to be on going or consist of episodes that will be over 10 minutes in length. You may find one or two that may want to help with smaller projects, but because these will all be done for free, finding someone to get that involved is slim.
Every animator that is out there, newgrounds, independent sites, and even youtube all started the same way. They didn’t know shit. They just got up and decided they wanted to do it. And that’s what you have to decide. Do you really want to see your idea become reality? And if the answer is yes then keep reading.
I’m at work, so the amount of detail I can put into this is slim, but I will be adding more content and tutorials and such when I get home.

Recommendations:

A pen tablet -It will make your life so much easier as opposed to using a mouse. With the tablet you'll be able to draw everything like you would normally do with a piece of paper and pencil.
Outline- It's just easier to organize a project of this magnittude if you have an outline of the story. Trust me, it matters.
Storyboard-Really, really, really useful. Consider it a rough no detailed comic strip. From seeing the beginning and final position of a frame it'll be that much easier to come up with the frames in between each.
Anatomy Books- Get to know the human body, seeing the anatomy structure in detail with help you with your art as well as how the muscles should look when moved into different positions.
Patience- This is a definite, this is a project that is going to take an insane amount of time and dedication. It may be hard to be focused, but if you can then you'll be pleased.

Software

You need something to make it work right? There are various ways to make an animation. I’m going to briefly outline them for you. Any other animators that may be here feel free to add your own insight.
Computer Animation: Computer animation is simply animation developed by digital means. Namely drawing the animation on the computer rather than traditional methods of pencil and paper.


1. Flash – This is pretty much the amateur standard. It’s what Newgrounds is based off of. It’s pretty straight forward in how it works. You’re given a timeline and individual frames. You can animate in Flash in a variety of ways.
o FBF (Frame by frame) –which means hand drawing each and every frame. It takes longer, but this method offers smoother results.
o Tweening (Motion or Shape) – This is probably the easiest way in flash to animate. You take a frame you drew and make it an object, and then you make another frame where you move the object to it’s final destination. Then you create what’s called a motion tween and Flash creates the frames in between the first and final frame.


2. Anime Studio –Software that is made specifically for animation, where as flash is geared towards web and design types of animations and applications. I don’t know much about this software yet as I use Flash. But I will be researching it and will put in tutorials from what I find out. If there are animators that use this software please feel free to put down information I may not have.


3. Photoshop and Image Ready + Windows Movie Maker- This is another technique which I’m not 100% familiar with. I know this is popular with the youtube crowd. It involves scanning in your drawings, mixing FBF digital with traditional. In Photoshop you ink and color the frames and then export them to Image Ready. From there you can set frames and a timeline (I did this once a while ago for something simple, I may be off a bit or a lot.) and you can export it as an animated gif. But that’s not what you want, an animated gif is nice for a simple sig, but not for a full blown animation. With Movie Maker you can combine your images together using their timeline. This is a little more involved and complicated, I don’t recommend it. It just doesn’t make sense to use 3-4 programs (scanner,PS, IR and MM) to make something when you can do it all in Flash or Anime Studio.


Again, with the above digital formats I’m only 100% adept in one of them. I will look into the rest and continue to put any useful findings/tutorials here.
When I am home I will be putting up a simple fbf and motion tweening tutorial with flash in the thread.


For now I just wanted to get this off my chest, which is why I didn’t wait. XD.
I hope that this is something that may be useful for aspiring animators and those looking to get into it.

Weekly Tutorials

Every week, Monday I will be posting a tutorial on how to animate. This week I will go over FBF basics and Motion Tweening Basics. I will outline a few lessons that I shall follow through on. Also, I will be available every night on aim (nikedrummer33) or skype (adam.tilford) if anyone would like to discuss anything animation related.

I will also take requests for tutorials.

I will also cover basic Action Script for particle effects, like rain, snow, etc.

[Makopi]

As a fellow animator, I think this is a great and very helpful thread! =D

Also, there's the Photoshop and putting frames together in Vegas 9.0 method (that's what I use, hahahh...*sweatdrop*)

[Adam]

As a fellow animator, I think this is a great and very helpful thread! =D

Also, there's the Photoshop and putting frames together in Vegas 9.0 method (that's what I use, hahahh...*sweatdrop*)

Thanks. Ah yes Vegas. I'll add that to the list.

I'm putting together some flash tutorials now actually to put in.

Just an example of topics of tutorials I will be posting in regards to Flash:

Frame by Frame Basics
Motion Tweening Basics
Masking
Particle Effects in Action Script
Preloaders
Adding Sound
Lip Syncing
Exporting as a Movie
Special Effects
Frame Rate
Movie Clips

I'm probably forgetting a few. Oh well, other animators please feel free to add your own tutorials if you'd like.

All the tutorials I do will be available on Azure-Productions.com. They will be linked to there from here.

[Erica]

Awesome! I'll be keeping an eye on this thread seeing as how I never got the hang of flash.. it'll probably be helpful for me to actually learn it one of these days.. haha.

I'd like to note that Adobe After Effects is good for animating too. It's what I've been using in class as of late and while I'm not great at it.. it's an interesting program.

[Adam]

Awesome! I'll be keeping an eye on this thread seeing as how I never got the hang of flash.. it'll probably be helpful for me to actually learn it one of these days.. haha.

I'd like to note that Adobe After Effects is good for animating too. It's what I've been using in class as of late and while I'm not great at it.. it's an interesting program.

Oh yeah After Effects, I recently got it when I got a hold of the CS4 master collection XD. I haven't had a chance to mess around with it yet. I'll include After Effects as well.

I didn't get a chance to finish a tutorial tonight, I'm half way done with the introduction/basics to Flash tutorial.

So to keep those who are interested in this thread and have flash I have something for you.

3 particle resources.

Click here (http://www.azure-productions.com/ap_tutorials.zip)

Included:

Snow fall (Created by me using AS 2, the following 2 are resources I picked up. I created some rain ones, but these are much better than the ones I made.)

Rain
Fireworks

Enjoy for now.

[TheFirstForgottenSoul]

This is amazing, thank you for putting this up. This should make things much easier for me, I'll keep looking at this for updates!

[Adam]

This is amazing, thank you for putting this up. This should make things much easier for me, I'll keep looking at this for updates!

I'm glad. It's not a problem. I know there's a lot of animators in hiding here, namely because they're shy and have no reputation due to lack of producing anything. I figured this would be something beneficial to everyone.

I'm going to try and be consistent with tutorials and any help I can offer. I'm still learning as well so there may be easier way to do things I may go over, and if anyone knows of this don't hold back, feel free to put your input and own advice.

I will try to get at least a basics of Flash tutorial up tonight after work.

[Adam]

I know this fell off when things in my life got a little complicated. But I have been working on tutorials. I am going to restart this in a sense and start updating it, starting tonight.

Tonight's will mainly focus on the "Basics of Flash"

Topics will include

Getting Familiar with the Area
Document Basics (Ie, setting the dimensions of the stage, frame rate etc)
Pencil Tool vs Brush Tool
Motion Tweening and Basic FBF Animation
Importing Graphics and Sound
Adjusting Publish settings for quality
I promise this time it's going to be updated frequently. I've already gotten some of the tutorials finished already.

[Adam]

I have updated the first post with the first tutorial. It just covers the basics of the Flash. Namely the areas, tools, publishing and how to change some settings.

The next one will cover actually animating and the difference between certain tools.

I hope this is helpful.

[Tomoyo Ichijouji]

I've just downloaded Anime Studio Debut, and sometime when I actually have TIME to draw things (9_9), perhaps I should post about it here?

[Adam]

Yeah please do. I haven't touched Anime Studio. So anything you could contribute would be greatly appreciated. I'd probably just put it in the first post per your credit just to keep everything organized.

[ErBoi]

Out of curiosity, were you planning on covering the animation principles, like timing (slow-ins, slow-outs), the wave principle and squash-and-stretch? I know this is in the Tutorial section and the principles are more something for the Tips and Tricks board.
I'm mostly asking because I'm tempted to make a thread of my own to cover such a topic.

[Adam]

Out of curiosity, were you planning on covering the animation principles, like timing (slow-ins, slow-outs), the wave principle and squash-and-stretch? I know this is in the Tutorial section and the principles are more something for the Tips and Tricks board.
I'm mostly asking because I'm tempted to make a thread of my own to cover such a topic.

I would probably touch base on them slightly. Not in an overly detailed fashion.

If you want, you could just put it in this thread. There's few animators on this forum, and fewer that actually produce a consistent series.

So it'd probably make sense to have one animation thread where all the animators just share their own tutorials one thread. Update the first post with each one, etc.

[ErBoi]

Alrighty. Honestly, I'd start now but I just got really tired. Heh.
But yeah, I'll use this thread if and when I get around to it.

EDIT: Alright, time for my first little lesson. I've recreated the first assignment I was ever given in my program because it's both very simple and very effective in teaching the most basic set of animation principles: A ball bounce. Animating a ball bouncing across a surface and eventually coming to a stop, and doing it properly, teaches you the following basics:

1. Timing - To space your drawings in such a way that you can show acceleration and deceleration. Just about any animator will tell you this is the most important animation principle.

2. Squash and Stretch - To alter the shape, while retaining the volume, of the animated object or character based on its motion. This makes your animation more fluid and shows velocity and impact.

3. Keys and In-Betweens - To draw the most important drawings first and fill in the spaces in between. Doing this, you can see if the timing of your animation is working long before it's even fully animated.

4. Planning - To draw out the path of action the animated object or character will follow and decide where each drawing needs to go on that path (which intertwines with 'Timing'). Having a visible plan before you even start animating anything makes it so you'll never be lost, you'll always know what came before and what comes next.

For this tutorial, I've created animations that are shot on 2's; a term that usually refers to having the video set at 24-frames-per-second, but the drawings are exposed for 2 frames each. This means that the animation itself is effectively running at 12-frames-per-second (and effects like camera-moves would still go at 24fps). This is the standard for most television frame-by-frame animation because it's a time (and money) saver and still effective in showing the principles. Animated feature films are almost always shot on 1's though, meaning a drawing on every frame.
Much of this tutorial is based on doing frame-by-frame animation but it can all be adapted to Flash or 3D animation. The method may be different but the principles are always the same.

So basically the exercise is to show a ball coming in from the left of the screen, bouncing to the right and eventually coming to a stop. Every consecutive bounce needs to be shorter (in height, width and time) than its predecessor until the ball finally stops bouncing. After it stops bouncing, it won't immediately stop moving since the final landing will still carry some velocity, so the ball needs to roll a bit before stopping.
For timing, when the ball is speeding up, the spacing between consecutive drawings needs to consistently get larger. And, of course, when slowing, the space between consecutive drawings gets smaller. Since each bounce needs to be shorter than the one before it, each one needs less drawings than the previous one and, obviously, won't go as high or as far. The ball will move its fastest when leaving the peak of a bounce as gravity accelerates it. It will also leave the ground with a good pop of speed that will slow down as it reaches the next peak.

Keeping all of this in mind, you can draw out a plan that looks something like this:
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a391/gohantrunks2k/BallBouncePlan.jpg
Obviously this looks a little sloppy but I can see the important stuff. I can see the height, distance and arc of every bounce and I can mark off where every drawing goes on them. The last couple bounces only have 2 and 1 drawings which will give the ball a couple of nice small jitters of a bounce just before it totally stops leaving the ground. Note that the drawings get closer and closer together at the end as the ball slows down as it's rolling.

Now that we have a plan, we can pick out the Keys, which are the drawings most important for conveying the action. So basically, thinking about the action, we ask what specifically shows people that a ball is bouncing. The answer would be that it hits the ground and comes back up. So that in mind, our keys will be the very peak and very bottom of every bounce. Since one of the bounces doesn't actually have a drawing marked off for the center/peak of the bounce, we'll just totally fill it in by putting a drawing on both of the indicated spots. We also need to convey that the ball has rolled to a stop at the end, so we'll need one final key on the very last spot. Take note that when the ball hits the ground, we also need to show impact by squashing the ball; since each consecutive bounce has less to it, there will also be less of an impact meaning the ball won't squash quite as much as it did before.
With the keys filled in, we can temporarily extend them to fill up the frames that will later be in-betweens and see what's called an Animatic...or Leica Reel depending on who you ask (seriously, I've gotten very conflicting info on whether there's a difference between these terms or not). Here is my Leica Reel for this animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZiqiu6VL3c
And here it is with the plan showing behind it. As you can see, every drawing falls on a spot indicated by the plan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEp7FJvgE48
Note: In the leica reel, each key-frame should take up it's own spot and all the in-betweens that come after it before the next key. Don't meet the keys half-way in-between or you won't be able to see the timing correctly.

This is the best time in your animation process to decide if you need to change anything. If you go any further, it's a huge pain to have to adjust just about anything; though that's admittedly more true with more complex animation as ball bounces don't take much effort to adjust.
Since I'm happy with the timing, let's move on. Now we fill in the in-betweens. While it's not going to be terribly important for something as simple as a ball-bounce, the common professional method is to find the next-most important drawings on the path of action and do those before finally filling in the rest. These are referred to as 'breakdowns' and are very important in just about any animation with the slightest bit of complexity. If I were to show an updated Leica Reel with breakdowns added in (which I admittedly did not think to prepare for this tutorial), it would contain the in-betweens that would help to show the arcs that the ball moves in.
The last thing to keep in mind as you finish your animation by filling in the left-over drawings is that, while we've shown impact with the ball squashing, we have yet to show speed with the ball stretching. As the ball leaves the peak of an arc, it will stretch out more and more before hitting the ground. It might seem strange to have a drawing where the ball is totally stretched out and then the very next drawing it's totally squashed but it's actually very powerful at conveying the impact and extremely common in professional animation; Looney Tunes is a particularly good example of this with how often characters will fly through the air only to crash into a wall.
One other breakdown you would do before totally filling in the animation would be a drawing somewhere between the end of the last bounce and the last key. Pick one of the spots that favours the end of the animation so you can tell that the ball is slowing down in the updated Leica Reel.
After that, it's simple fill-in-the-blanks work and we get something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaUPTI4S3pY
And, once more, here it is with the plan behind it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JOfvTIhLIw
It's a little harder to see here since all the drawings go by in a twelfth of a second, but again every drawing rests on top of one of the indicated spots on the path of action.

When I first did this assignment, we spent two full classes on it. I don't remember whether it was a 2 or 3 hour class but needless to say, your first go at animation can take a while. In time, all of these principles become second nature and re-doing the assignment for the sake of this tutorial took approximately 25 minutes. A very small bit of that difference can be attributed to the fact that I did not draw every frame this time. I merely created a circle in ToonBoom and moved and transformed it as needed.
Incidentally, this is actually around the 10th time I've done this animation or something very similar to it. Ball bounces, among some others that I'll get to another time, are often considered animation exercises, in that they're something a prepared animator should be able to do at any given time just to warm themselves up. So I encourage aspiring animators to practice this tutorial every so often.

In closing: I hope this helped. I know it's very lengthy and wordy for something that seems really simple but I wanted to be as thorough as possible. Thanks for reading.

[Kauritsuo]

Alrighty. Honestly, I'd start now but I just got really tired. Heh.
But yeah, I'll use this thread if and when I get around to it.

EDIT: Alright, time for my first little lesson. I've recreated the first assignment I was ever given in my program because it's both very simple and very effective in teaching the most basic set of animation principles: A ball bounce. Animating a ball bouncing across a surface and eventually coming to a stop, and doing it properly, teaches you the following basics:

1. Timing - To space your drawings in such a way that you can show acceleration and deceleration. Just about any animator will tell you this is the most important animation principle.

2. Squash and Stretch - To alter the shape, while retaining the volume, of the animated object or character based on its motion. This makes your animation more fluid and shows velocity and impact.

3. Keys and In-Betweens - To draw the most important drawings first and fill in the spaces in between. Doing this, you can see if the timing of your animation is working long before it's even fully animated.

4. Planning - To draw out the path of action the animated object or character will follow and decide where each drawing needs to go on that path (which intertwines with 'Timing'). Having a visible plan before you even start animating anything makes it so you'll never be lost, you'll always know what came before and what comes next.

For this tutorial, I've created animations that are shot on 2's; a term that usually refers to having the video set at 24-frames-per-second, but the drawings are exposed for 2 frames each. This means that the animation itself is effectively running at 12-frames-per-second (and effects like camera-moves would still go at 24fps). This is the standard for most television frame-by-frame animation because it's a time (and money) saver and still effective in showing the principles. Animated feature films are almost always shot on 1's though, meaning a drawing on every frame.
Much of this tutorial is based on doing frame-by-frame animation but it can all be adapted to Flash or 3D animation. The method may be different but the principles are always the same.

So basically the exercise is to show a ball coming in from the left of the screen, bouncing to the right and eventually coming to a stop. Every consecutive bounce needs to be shorter (in height, width and time) than its predecessor until the ball finally stops bouncing. After it stops bouncing, it won't immediately stop moving since the final landing will still carry some velocity, so the ball needs to roll a bit before stopping.
For timing, when the ball is speeding up, the spacing between consecutive drawings needs to consistently get larger. And, of course, when slowing, the space between consecutive drawings gets smaller. Since each bounce needs to be shorter than the one before it, each one needs less drawings than the previous one and, obviously, won't go as high or as far. The ball will move its fastest when leaving the peak of a bounce as gravity accelerates it. It will also leave the ground with a good pop of speed that will slow down as it reaches the next peak.

Keeping all of this in mind, you can draw out a plan that looks something like this:
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a391/gohantrunks2k/BallBouncePlan.jpg
Obviously this looks a little sloppy but I can see the important stuff. I can see the height, distance and arc of every bounce and I can mark off where every drawing goes on them. The last couple bounces only have 2 and 1 drawings which will give the ball a couple of nice small jitters of a bounce just before it totally stops leaving the ground. Note that the drawings get closer and closer together at the end as the ball slows down as it's rolling.

Now that we have a plan, we can pick out the Keys, which are the drawings most important for conveying the action. So basically, thinking about the action, we ask what specifically shows people that a ball is bouncing. The answer would be that it hits the ground and comes back up. So that in mind, our keys will be the very peak and very bottom of every bounce. Since one of the bounces doesn't actually have a drawing marked off for the center/peak of the bounce, we'll just totally fill it in by putting a drawing on both of the indicated spots. We also need to convey that the ball has rolled to a stop at the end, so we'll need one final key on the very last spot. Take note that when the ball hits the ground, we also need to show impact by squashing the ball; since each consecutive bounce has less to it, there will also be less of an impact meaning the ball won't squash quite as much as it did before.
With the keys filled in, we can temporarily extend them to fill up the frames that will later be in-betweens and see what's called an Animatic...or Leica Reel depending on who you ask (seriously, I've gotten very conflicting info on whether there's a difference between these terms or not). Here is my Leica Reel for this animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZiqiu6VL3c
And here it is with the plan showing behind it. As you can see, every drawing falls on a spot indicated by the plan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEp7FJvgE48
Note: In the leica reel, each key-frame should take up it's own spot and all the in-betweens that come after it before the next key. Don't meet the keys half-way in-between or you won't be able to see the timing correctly.

This is the best time in your animation process to decide if you need to change anything. If you go any further, it's a huge pain to have to adjust just about anything; though that's admittedly more true with more complex animation as ball bounces don't take much effort to adjust.
Since I'm happy with the timing, let's move on. Now we fill in the in-betweens. While it's not going to be terribly important for something as simple as a ball-bounce, the common professional method is to find the next-most important drawings on the path of action and do those before finally filling in the rest. These are referred to as 'breakdowns' and are very important in just about any animation with the slightest bit of complexity. If I were to show an updated Leica Reel with breakdowns added in (which I admittedly did not think to prepare for this tutorial), it would contain the in-betweens that would help to show the arcs that the ball moves in.
The last thing to keep in mind as you finish your animation by filling in the left-over drawings is that, while we've shown impact with the ball squashing, we have yet to show speed with the ball stretching. As the ball leaves the peak of an arc, it will stretch out more and more before hitting the ground. It might seem strange to have a drawing where the ball is totally stretched out and then the very next drawing it's totally squashed but it's actually very powerful at conveying the impact and extremely common in professional animation; Looney Tunes is a particularly good example of this with how often characters will fly through the air only to crash into a wall.
One other breakdown you would do before totally filling in the animation would be a drawing somewhere between the end of the last bounce and the last key. Pick one of the spots that favours the end of the animation so you can tell that the ball is slowing down in the updated Leica Reel.
After that, it's simple fill-in-the-blanks work and we get something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaUPTI4S3pY
And, once more, here it is with the plan behind it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JOfvTIhLIw
It's a little harder to see here since all the drawings go by in a twelfth of a second, but again every drawing rests on top of one of the indicated spots on the path of action.

When I first did this assignment, we spent two full classes on it. I don't remember whether it was a 2 or 3 hour class but needless to say, your first go at animation can take a while. In time, all of these principles become second nature and re-doing the assignment for the sake of this tutorial took approximately 25 minutes. A very small bit of that difference can be attributed to the fact that I did not draw every frame this time. I merely created a circle in ToonBoom and moved and transformed it as needed.
Incidentally, this is actually around the 10th time I've done this animation or something very similar to it. Ball bounces, among some others that I'll get to another time, are often considered animation exercises, in that they're something a prepared animator should be able to do at any given time just to warm themselves up. So I encourage aspiring animators to practice this tutorial every so often.

In closing: I hope this helped. I know it's very lengthy and wordy for something that seems really simple but I wanted to be as thorough as possible. Thanks for reading.

Everything you've said. So True! Love it!

[POOHEAD189]

The reason you get very little responses to your threads isn’t because no one likes you because you have leprosy.
It did freak me out a lil bit how everyone was psychic :P

As a fellow animator, I think this is a great and very helpful thread! =D

Also, there's the Photoshop and putting frames together in Vegas 9.0 method (that's what I use, hahahh...*sweatdrop*)
LOL! I just dowloaded both of those a week ago for 2 different reasons. Well...thats lucky I guess.

Thanx for the toturial Adam, you rule.

[BrightestDream]

I've always been a windows movie maker gal, because I never have any money to obtain better software. And because I've only ever put together very short 2D animations, working more with stop. I was wondering if you were planning on discussing lip sync sometime soon, if at all. Would you recommend making a scratch tape first?

Thank you!

[Adam]

I've always been a windows movie maker gal, because I never have any money to obtain better software. And because I've only ever put together very short 2D animations, working more with stop. I was wondering if you were planning on discussing lip sync sometime soon, if at all. Would you recommend making a scratch tape first?

Thank you!

I intend to discuss lip sync, but, I'm not sure how with Windows Movie Maker it could work. I never used it. Basically, you need the audio first, and with Flash you should have it set to "stream" so you can scrub through the time line and place keyframes at the right moment. For the most part I'll just use 3 types of lip flaps for the ease of getting an episode actually done. 1) Closed 2)Opened midway 3) Open all the way. And then just go back and forth with them, placing them in the proper key frame position. This is the easiest way to do it if you want to save time. If you're not trying to do a long series like project and you can spare the extra time to do more detailed lip flaps that will mimic the vowels and such as well as chin movement then that's another story.

But I really don't know how that would work with WMM since I've never used it for animation and don't really know the features open to you.

[ErBoi]

Oh jeez, that's right, I just started a fresh YouTube account and had to close my other one. Looks like I'll have to re-upload those examples.

On another note, Movie Maker can be used for animation though it's hard to recommend it even free as it is. The shortest amount of time you can expose an image for in Movie Maker is 1/15th of a second. It's just a very awkward framerate to figure things out with. There are some free animation programs out there though. A good place to start is here: http://alternativeto.net/software/toon-boom-studio/
That's a website I discovered recently dedicated to listing alternatives to software. That link will bring you right to the list of alternatives to Toon Boom.

I may be doing some other tutorials soon. I'm finished college now so, in-between job hunting and housework, I've got some free time.

[Tomoyo Ichijouji]

Oooh, thanks for the free alternatives link. I've just downloaded a program called "Synfig" and going through the User Manual right now. Let's see how it agrees with me! XD

[Adam]

This is something I did for Shattered Heaven and to serve as a test for camstudio. It came out a bit laggy, so either I had the quality to record set too high or I had way too many programs open. I'll be doing some better animation videos in the future. Probably this weekend. It's a lot easier to do it this way then to write it out. Makes more sense to explain as I do it and you can see it XD.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5y5rVlstrQ

It's just a quick look at the animation process I use in Flash for the series, nothing majorly special.

This is actually the scene that I was working on in that video (http://azure-productions.com/act_5_scene3.html)

[Adam]

I am going to continue this, but in a weekly format. New entries will be released Sunday.

http://azureprostudios.com/Blog/2011/behind-the-animations-1-tools/

[Shadowken]

YES! This is going to help. I've been wanting to animate for a long time now. I'll have to read up on this when i get on my laptop.

[Adam]

This should have been released Sunday.

Introduction to Adobe Flash (CS4)

http://azureprostudios.com/Blog/2011/behind-the-animation-2-welcome-to-adobe-flash-cs4/

[Adam]

Third tutorial has been updated, http://azureprostudios.com/Blog/2011/behind-the-animation-3-frames-from-start-to-finish/