Help please, your recommended animation software.

Captain Fertile

Hi All

I have spent a time checking out your movies etc and have been impressed by many.

I was wondering if anyone out there recommends any software for creating animations similar to the Southpark Style of Animation.

Short cartoons maybe 5 minutes in length incorporating sound and music and possibly incorporating some elements of pre-recorded live video on the odd occasion.

I would probably use Photoshop for the creation of characters, backgrounds etc. unless you know of a good package created specifically for this job.

I was toying with the idea of maybe using flash but can anyone recommend anything else and let me know why you recommend them.

If you need any further info just let me know, I realise the info I have given so far is sketchy at best.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Regards
The Captain

eLto

Well, if you want to do vector graphics 2d animation, use flash. do some tutorials, and you'll be going at it in no time.

If you want to make it non-vector, I suggest using a mixture of adobe photoshop and adobe imageready. Imageready comes with the installation of photoshop, so there's no problem there.

VidE

You can also check out Anime Studio at e-frontier.com. Cheaper than Flash and really designed for animation. There are 2 versions, one firly inexpensive. Also there is Kool Moves, another vector animation software, again lest cost than flash. On the raster side, check out Project Dogwaffle, I believe even their free version has animation capabilities and dogwaffle has excellent 'natural media' tools.

Finally there is Toon Boom, which is somewhat different, more about bringing in and manipulating already drqwn cels or cel components, with lots of tools for lip sync, etc. I believe they sell a lite version for not too much either.

indeedwrestling

I've done most of my animations through MSDOS Debug & MS Paint.

Captain Fertile

Thanks guys, you have given me a few ideas to look into.

I have tried flash 8 pro a little but just can't seem to get my foot in the door with it. The user interface seems so unfriendly.

I get the idea of the timeline etc. but just can’t get results to make me want to keep working at it. I really would like to learn flash but for some reason I just can’t get me head around it.

Does anyone know of any good basic tutorials I could try to get me up and running quickly with flash? It seems such a superb product and I like Macromedia (I use Dreamweaver already)

Failing that I will maybe try one the other options suggested to me.

Thanks again.

Regards
The Captain

eLto

here you go. pixel2life does also cover almost every other aspect of the program, so bookmark the page.

http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/macromedia_flash/basics_and_navigation_help/

Captain Fertile

magneto_ms

hey, all the best for you. Pixel2life is a great place for hunting down tutorials on flash. And here is another good site for you for learning flash. I learned many of the stuff i know from here:

www.kirupa.com

marrs

I have tryed a few animations programs and i found that moho was the easyest to get used to it because of the great tutorials.

Check it out here http://www.lostmarble.com

budazz

Flash maybe the best tool for creating animation... try 3d softwares also... this could help too for your animation needs Laughing

spike75

I reccomend Toon Boom studio. Its really good for 2d animation one of the best.

Kev01234

I currently have flash for making animations. Is there a better program for it because I haven't taken any classes in it and it seems to be kinda hard to learn. Thanks, kevin

bluecradle

I started with FlashMx2004 and i learned quickly from it, maybe you should try this version out first.

marrs