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Single White Newbie

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Single White Newbie

Hello,

First, I'd like to say that I think I found a winner with this forum. Today is the first time I've been here, and I've already spent about an hour watching cartoons.

I am completely new to animation, and was hoping for some advice on how to learn. (I mean 2D.) For example, what software? I bought a book this weekend called "Hollywood 2D Digital Animation," and created my first little cartoon in Flash. I've also heard alot about toonboom. What are the advantages of each? Or would there be an advantage to learning one before the other?

Thanks in advance, if anyone is interested here is a link to my first cartoon, it is basically just a character I designed so that I could practice with "squash and stretch."

Welcome

I use flash, it does what it says on the tin and works well.

For a first attempt your short works well. I especially liked the bg buildings.

The Brothers McLeod
[SIZE=2]brothersmcleod.co.uk[/SIZE]

Yeah, that's very good work for a beginner! Congrats! :)

I also like Flash...I think that it is more user friendly than toonboom. I like to do traditional work in Flash, mainly because it is affordable and quick to use. I tried Toonboom but couldn't get on with it like Flash. I've heard that Toomboom is good if you want to lipsync quickly. I don't have much trouble lipsyncing so I'm not bothered about using it. Apparently, if you tell it what you want to say, it will do the lipsyncing for you. Don't know if that's true though.

toob boom has some elements that i like but they would be better off making plugins for flash you know?

glad im not alone in the new area

ive been animating for others but i rairly get time for my own work so hey i guess we can learn together

Thanks for the inupt, guys!

Yep, Flash seems to be pretty popular. Any other advice you could give someone trying to learn to animate? I basically decided to keep assigning myself little short cartoons to make focusing on practicing one technique. Amy mentioned mentioned, lip sync, above. Could try that, although I don't know if I'm that far.

Tks again

lipsinc can be your first step

you can start where every you feal in this aslong as you have an art style to start with

Flash was a revelation for me. I'd always wanted to get into animation and it gave me an opportunity to make stuff fast and efficiently. I only started using it 3 years ago and now it's a major part of our output.

Check out some of our shows

http://sparkandzoom.com/channel/

The Brothers McLeod
[SIZE=2]brothersmcleod.co.uk[/SIZE]

The best advice I could give you is to buy 'The Animator's Survival Kit'. It's a great book! Teaches all areas of the animation process.

i think one should draw as much as possible and try to capture the action through quick sketching...everything revolves around 24 frames (which is equal to a second) and you can do anything within it. the most important thing is the Timing of an action which includes lip sync also. if your fundamentals of animation are clear then any medium will work well. gesture drawings is very important. good luck :)

grega-- cool. its motivating to see such great animation coming from someone who admits they haven't been using Flash for too long. Don't know if it was one of yours but I liked "highlights" the best. John Kerry song was pretty cool, too. :-)

any-- thanks for the advice. Actually, I bought the book, just now. It got some good reviews, and it made sense to get a book about the basics of animation before getting more books about animating software, ya know. Man, amazon is making a killing off of my hobbies! :-)

bangbang-- thanks for the input. Its easy to recognize the difference between low quality animation which doesn't look natural and real quality animation which flows. I'm pretty sure the difference is timing.

Tchüß