How do I do animation on Windows XP?

Question

I really want to make a cartoon and post it on myspace.com. But, How do I do animation on my Windows XP computer? I really need some help! give me as much information as you can!

Answer 1

You will need animation software. I highly recommend Adobe Flash CS3. You can edit each image frame by frame. The end result is an animation.

Answer 2

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://www.animationmeat.com/notes/notes...

Answer 3

Yeah, Adobe is nice, but it's hellishly expensive, s***w that!  

check out some open source stuff at

http://sourceforge.net   I know you'll find everything you could need

Answer 4

Get Blender. It is a free animation program. I don't not how to use it but it has great possibilities as can be seen on youtube. Anyway go to http://www.blender.org/ to get it. There are tutorials on youtube.