A newcomer could use some help!

[PattyMurphy]

Hey newgrounds community. I've been a visitor to this website for many years now and I really enjoy all the great animations and games, music etc. that have been created here by the artists. I am really impressed and inspired. I am a very creative person and I would like to get some of my ideas out to the public and animation is something that has always intrigued me, so lately I've been giving it a shot. For the past few weeks I've been reading and watching tutorials as well as tons of animations trying to really get how this whole thing works. So far.. not so good. I have learned alot and I kind of know how to animate and I think I get the whole drawing aspect of it. But making several scenes and putting it all together is where I really get screwed up here, It's becoming quite frustrating and as much as my pride hates it I'm here to ask for help.

So if anyone has tips or websites that you have found helpful when you were learning to animate that would be great, or just any information at all that helped just kind of make it click for you.

So to all you animators out there keep up the good work.. and hopefully I can start putting some of my own content up here soon if everything goes ok.

Thanks for your time - peace.

[maficmelody]

Create a storyboard of a small/simple idea. Be certain your character designs are solid enough for you to animate. Knowledge of depth and perspective will help.

Start by drawing out key poses you need to hit according to your storyboard. Scrub through on the timeline to make sure they work before you draw the frames inbetween, connecting the poses.

Keep going.. never give up! Never surrender!

[Neo-Egyptian]

An excellent start is Adam Phillips' four-part animation tutorial, which you can find here:

http://bitey.com/2009/03/bca-flash-2/

The first two tutorials are completely free and the second two can be purchased for a few dollars, they are well worth a look.

Beyond the above, if you're genuinely serious about getting into animation I cannot recommend Richard Williams' Animators Survival Kit enough - it is, in my mind, the single best guide to animation ever written/illustrated. It takes you through absolutely everything (walk and run cycles, how to do great keys and inbetweens, lip-sync, eyes, expressions - it's all there) plus it's just a great book to read.

[PattyMurphy]

Thanks for the feedback. I found those tutorials quite helpful. I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on camera work, like zooming and panning. I've tried just stretching the background to the size of the stage and then putting it back to normal size to create a zooming out effect using a motion tween but it always turns out weird and not like I hoped it would.

[Neo-Egyptian]

One pretty effective way of doing zooms and pans/tilts is to use vCam - it's basically a virtual camera you place on the stage that looks like a translucent rectangle. Whatever is 'inside' the rectangle is what the viewer will see when you've exported your animation - this means, by simply tweening the vCam from side to side or by shrinking or expanding it, you can create easy pans and zooms without having to tween a whole bunch of layers.

A fairly self-explanatory (and very, very basic) tutorial can be found here:

http://forums.stickpage.com/showthread.p hp?36-Flash-how-to-use-the-v-cam.

And you can get it from here:

http://bryanheisey.com/blog/?page_id=13

If you're finding it a bit weird to use, just play around with it - try drawing a pretty basic background, then tween the vCam to move from one side of the stage to the other over a few seconds. Export the animation and see what it looks like - this should give you a pretty good idea what you can do with it.

One thing to remember about the vCam is that it won't work so well for zooms and pans when you have lots of foreground and background elements. For example, if you'd drawn a pretty detailed forest scene with shrubs and bushes in the foreground and trees in the background, using vCam for a zoom would make everything move towards the screen at the same time. This is obviously pretty unrealistic, as the foreground elements would move towards the viewer faster than stuff in the distance.

Just play around with it and see what happens!