How To Make Animated Cartoons On The Computer?

Question

Is there a easy program that lets u make animated cartoons?

If yes please tell me what it is.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Easiest program that you may not need to download anything at all:

Paint and Windows Movie Maker!

=D

The suckiest programs, but very easy and simple to use. I recommend you to use these 2 programs before going to more advanced animation making program (if you know any).

First, you need to notice how animation work. An animation requires numbers of "slides". Each slide has a picture and the next slide will move a little. For example, if you want a character to wink, select a slide and figure out how this is done. Now make another slide and slightly adjust one of the eyes. The eye should have an eyelid moving slightly downward. Keep making more slides while moving down the eyelid little by little until you have a slide that have an eye fully closed.

After that, put each slides in the Windows Movie Maker (use Help if you don't know how to use it) in sequence. You can adjust the speed of the animation (you can make how fast or slow it'll make) by increasing or decreasing the length of each slide. After that, save it and see how it is done!

Enjoy! ^_~

"Slow motion" eye speed:

http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/8723/ey...

(as you can see, you must make a "choppy" slides before making a "smooth" animation)

How animation will be:

http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/1176/...

(lol, took me like 30 minutes to make all these and record/upload them)

Answer 2

Don't use windows movie Maker to actually shoot or compile your animation together. You should use a program specifically designed for stop-motion animation purposes to actually compile your movie, then edit your larger clips afterwards in a video editing program like Windows Movie Maker. An animation program will make it easier to arrange, re-arrange, add and delete single frames. Typically, playing around with multiple single frames is kind of difficult and bothersome in video editors since they weren't designed with frame by frame animation as a primary function in mind.

Some of the better commercial 2D animation programs such as Digicel Flipbook, Toon Boom, TVPaint, TAB, and PAP, have Student or Express versions that are fairly inexpensive. However, you might be disappointed by how crippled these stripped down programs are compared to their more expensive Pro versions. But if you look hard enough you should be able to find them cracked online (rapidshare, bittorrent). There are some free alternatives.

If you're doing old school drawn on paper frame by frame stuff or stop-motion or 2D, I'd suggest MonkeyJam. It's free.

http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.co...

If you're on a Mac, use Pencil(there's PC and Linux versions as well).

http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil...

If you want to do Flash animation like the stuff on Newgrounds.com, either break down and buy Adobe Flash or you can try Creatoon or Synfig, which are free. They're not Flash, but they also do vector based symbol oriented

animation.

http://www.creatoon.com/index.php

http://www.synfig.org/

Here are some online resources about the basic principles of animation.

http://www.idleworm.com/how/index.shtml

http://www.awn.com/tooninstitute/lessonp...

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/...

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/...

http://www.karmatoons.com/drawing/1a.htm

http://www.animationarena.com/principles...

http://w ww.animationmeat.com/notes/notes.html