My attempt at animation

I’ve loved cartoons and Japanese animation for most of my life, but never felt the itch to become an animator like some people do. I always loved comics and loved the idea of telling a story in still images.

But there are certain story ideas that work better animated than in comic form. Plus I love how a series of 2D images can trick the eye to think that it’s movement.

Once in a great while I feel a desire to try my hand at animating. Though I would love to be as traditional as possible. Yes, I want to draw out frame by frame like the crazed mad woman. I know how to use Flash and using tween to animate between frames is much more practical and easier to do than drawing them out by hand. But it’s just one of those things that I want to try once in my life. It won’t be a feature film, but maybe a couple minutes long.

Thought I have several issues in attempting this.

1. I can’t do it on paper because I have nowhere to store the artwork that will be safe from my cat (so I have to go digital)
2. Can’t find a digital program that will make it easy to put together a sequence of images and export it into something I can upload to Youtube or Facebook.

I tried  a program last year called Pencil and it was suggested to use another program called Monkey to help put the frames together to export as a video. But they didn’t really work for me, but did help me animate the video shown below.

Those 4 seconds that consisted of hundreds of images took hours to do, but I found even this small bit a huge accomplishment that I had fun doing. But trying to export it as a video was a huge pain that took longer than it took to draw the frames. Plus I didn’t like the brushes the program had when I wanted to smooth out the lines and color in the frames with color. Out of frustration I quit and figured I failed at trying to 2D animate.

A year later and now I feel like taking another crack at it, but currently looking into other animation software.
Thinking of looking into using Flash again and trying to see if I can somehow make it look less like a vector image. Feel free to share links if you know any tutorials on how to do this or leave a comment if you know any tips and tricks to accomplish this.

Here are some other bits of animation I did in the past for class projects or just to be silly.

This first video was made for my Adobe After Effects class.

This second video was when I was a TA for a class. I quickly put it together as an example of how to use some of the sound files available in the class library and not on how to animate. Even the audio isn’t fantastic, but I only had 15 minutes and it inspired the class to create their own projects.