Hey, I'm doing my first 2d animation and I have a question about how things are done. I plan on animating the characters on paper and what not and make the backgrounds in photoshop. (first off, let me know if thats a good idea or not.)
But my major question is, how should I go about taking each frame drawing and placing it over the background and what not. Shoud I ink each frame? then scan and then what? or should I scan and trace in photoshop or illustrator?
Any suggestions would be great
thanks
So what type of animation are you planning on doing? Is it going to be in Flash or more of a Disney style perse(sp).
As a matter of fact you might consider investing in some After Effects if you already have Photoshop. You can do a lot of stuff there. Otherwise you will have to scan each of your hand drawings into Photoshop.
Photoshop comes with ImageReady, which has(is) a really sensitive, simple time control and compositioning animation program. It's cool that this is included, you can compose your PS pictures and work directly with them in ImageReady, the sidekick program.
really...I have imageready but I've never really used it except for some web stuff.
I wouldn't really say its flash animation...I'm drawing each frame out (except for the backgorund...so yeah I guess what I wanted to know what the best way of compositing the drawings onto the background would be.
there are a lot of solutions to your problem. You could work the way that you had planned for yourself,sounds logical.
Imageready doesnt handle larger files all that well and is really meant for simple cyclical animations (not sure what kind of scale your talking).Flash may be better apt to handle larger scale projects.
You could always work "traditionally" with a camera, using printouts from photoshop.What im getting at is...well dont be afraid to f up what your working on.Try and try again because only you will figure out what will work for you. Get some books, look at as much animation as you can and make as much animation as you can.good luck.
you can try digicel flipbook for free.
See if it is what you want.
It is good for doing tests and some cool, fun playing around stuff.
I used it to build the 2D animations that I putinto my short film.
You can do your frames and overlays in after effects, premiere, most video software.
But I would go for digicel or something like it.
Happy Trails,
Eric HEdman
animation-story-design-art