I was planning (more like pre-planning) an idea for a short, and I thought that it would be nice to add the element of animation along with video. The thing is I am very inexperienced with animation seeing as I have once animated an eye moving and another time animated someone saying "Woah"... and that's about it. But I do feel a can draw a scene well enough, and could animate it if I knew exactly how to do so and what programs/ techniques to use. Right now I use Sony Vegas (Older version but still totally usable and good to use) for editing and I heard once that the key frames feature can be used to animate. For picture editing I use GIMP.

Now I remember hearing once that in an animation, to make it look smooth, one frame is repeated a bunch of times in one second (Does that sentence even make sense. It's late D: ) Is this accurate? This question is out of curiosity more than anything.

Any tips and help would be great.

I suppose you could use a video editing program to make a rough animation.

The method would be a lot like traditional, hand drawn 2D animation. You would have to draw all your frames in GIMP (or draw them by hand and scan them in). Then you would import them all into Vegas in order and set the duration of each picture to 2 or 3 frames.

This method would result in basically a movie form of an animated GIF...for serious 2D animation, Adobe Flash really speeds up the process and is pretty much the foundation.

Then again, I am not too familiar with Sony Vegas, so I am not sure if this Vegas keyframing function you mention has some similarities to Flash? (layers, vector-imaging, etc) If it had some Flash-like capabilities, that would drastically affect your approach.


What exactly is this animation going to include?

I'll try Flash if it will make it easier for me. Actually looking over the program (Vegas) the only times key frames are used are in panning. cropping, and effects. My noob mistake. To be honest though Flash has never been friendly to me, any tips on that?

Sure, man. (Haha, I actually spent a good portion of last semester teaching Flash.) I'm not sure how familiar you are with Flash, so I'll start near the beginning. If its stuff you already know, feel free to just skip over it.

1) Choose your canvas size and frame rate.

There should be a "properties" button or properties toolbar below the canvas that allows you to choose basic setup options. You can change the canvas size to pick widescreen or fullscreen or match the size of your painted GIMP scene backgrounds. A good frame rate to start out with is 15 frames per second...any lower frame rate starts to look jerky. If you are feeling ambitious or want things to look smoother, go for standard 24fps.

2)Keyframing




You sound like you are already familiar with the general idea of keyframing. In Flash, it is pretty simple, and it should become second nature fairly quickly. Your keyframing/timeline bar runs prominently across the top of the screen over the canvas. Each cell/box represents one frame of animation. You can grab the red slider and move it down the the timeline to select the frame you want to edit (active frame). To make your first keyframe, make sure the red sliding bar is over the first frame, and draw a circle or a random doodle on the left side of the canvas. Select the circle, and hit F8 and select "Convert to Symbol". Then right click on the first cell (frame 1 in the keyframing timeline) and select "Create New Keyframe". A black circle should appear in the cell to show that it is now a keyframe.

Lets say you want to make your circle/doodle to move aross the screen and end up on the right side of the screen on Frame 15. First, you roll your red slider down to Frame 15, If your circle/doodle disappeared from the canvas as soon as you moved the slider to Frame 15, it is because you have a blank keyframe somewhere in between Frame 1 and Frame 15. (a blank keyframe appears on the timeline as a black outline of a circle in a white cell) You will want to find the blank keyframe, right click on it and delete it. Now you are free to roll your red slider down to Frame 15, move your circle/doodle to the right side of the screen, and select "create new keyframe" on frame 15 in the timeline. Now you have two keyframes, which is essentially an "animation"


3) Tweening

Tweening is the core of animation in Flash, and probably the most handy tool. If you made the "animation" that I described above, you will notice if you move the red slider down the timeline (or hit Enter to play the movie) your circle/doodle will stay on the left side of the screen until Frame 14. At precisely Frame 15, your circle/doodle will "jump" to the right side of the canvas. This could be how you wanted your circle to move, but probably not. We are looking for a more gradual, smooth motion rather than an instantaneous jump. To solve this problem you could go to Frame 2, move the circle a bit to the right and create a keyframe, then move to Frame 3, move the circle a bit more to the right and create another keyframe, and so on for every single frame up until its final resting spot at Frame 15. Or you could use a Tween to do this automatically with only two keyframes. If you right-click in the gray space between your keyframes at Frame 1 and Frame 15 (circled in red in the photo above) you can select "Create Motion Tween". An arrow should appear in the timeline pointing from Frame 1 to Frame 15. Now if you play the animation, the circle will move at a constant rate across the screen before stopping at Frame 15.

You can also change the shape of an object gradually between two keyframes by creating a shape tween. (right click on timeline between keyframes, and select "create shape tween") You can also combine shape and motion tweens for very effective results.


4) Layers

Layers are your friends. They can save you from re-doing the same work over and over. You will want to use them a lot. For a character, you will generally want a seperate layer for every element. (Eyes, mouth, head, arms). To create a new layer, right click in the layer-name box (to the left of the timeline) and select "create new layer". I recommend naming each layer to keep things organized. You can move layers behind/infront of eachother by dragging them up or down in the list. You can also make layers invisible or lock them with the eye and padlock icons on the timeline.

5) Raster Images vs Vector Images

If you create a new background image for your scene in GIMP and import it into Flash...you will not be able to do anything to that background image to edit it other than rotation, translation, and scaling. This is because GIMP makes raster images (basically images that are made up of pixels of color). Flash is a vector imaging program. (basically images that are representations of mathematical lines, curves, areas, etc). This means that you cannot change anything about the image after you import it into Flash. For example you can't import the outline of a background from GIMP and color it in Flash. Or if you imported a cartoon background of a forest from GIMP, you would not be able to animate the tree swaying back and forth with Flash.

6) Symbols

When you draw a square in Flash...Flash does not recognize it as a square. It sees it as four separate lines. If you select all four lines, hit F8, and select "convert to symbol", those four lines merge into one object that can be moved and treated as a single object. Once you convert an object to a symbol, you cannot vary the color or make a difference in its shape. You will have to decide what things should be converted to objects and what things should not. For example, an eyeball keeps the same geometric shape and color throughout the entire scene, so it would be very efficient to select all the components of the eyeball and convert them to a symbol. However, a face that will be moving or turning should not be converted to a symbol, because the shape will distort as it turns. (which is not something a symbol can do)



Those are some of the basics, and you should be able to get a good start from there. If you have more questions, feel free to ask me here or send me a PM. There are a lot of tutorials on the web and instructional videos on youtube. Flash is a huge program, but it is a very powerful tool to know how to use

Good luck.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: braininabox,

Hey thanks a lot, this is definitely going to help. One final question: If I were to do all the frames by hand, could I then use Flash to animate the corresponding frames one by one effectively? I imagine it's a lot of work but I really want to keep a traditional feel to it. Further would using a program like Image Ready give the same effect?(Though I feel Flash could probably fulfill what I need best)

You could totally draw all the frames by hand, scan them in, and put them in sequence.

However, I would recommend that you draw and scan in just the outlines...and then trace over them and color them in all in Flash. This will result in a much sharper animation. Flash has excellent auto-smoothing and drawing tools, and since it is vector imaging, everything looks very clean.
Also, you can't tween or tweak the raster hand-drawn frames.

If I knew what your animation was going to be of, I probably would be able to help you with some more specific, applicable advice.

The way I do it takes alot of patience and paint drawings. Download a Microsoft .GIF Animator, open one paint file and draw one frame at a time. After each frame is finished, copy and paste into the animator, then time each frame for how long you want it to be on screen.

Example: GUNFIGHT

I gotta say that was pretty cool xD.

So 3 1/2 weeks drawing each frame, how many frames (approx.) per hour did you do?

I really couldn't say per hour. I think I ended up with over 10,000 total.