How to Create an Animated Film

Animation techniques vary from taking snapshots of paper cutouts to filming complex models with stop-motion cameras. These days most animators use their favorite animation software. The principles of animation remain the same no matter what approach you take, or the level of your experience.

Difficulty:

Challenging

Instructions

1. Plan your project. Develop a story line and characters. Your story should have a setup, and a well-defined climax (like a joke's punch line.) You might also add a brief resolution tying up any loose ends.

2. Storyboard your project. You don't have to draw well, but you should sketch out the highlights of the story. You can save a lot of time if you see your story laid out before your begin.

3. Draw your animation art. Think in terms of layers and dimension. Your art could include a background image (or matte), stationary objects and animated characters. You can hand draw your images and scan them, or create digitally.

4. Import your artwork into your animation program. Decide how you want the art to be arranged from top to bottom and place it onto the appropriate layers on the animation timeline. Most animation software allows you to nest motion sequences (such as a character running) as a single object.

5. Create keyframes to save you the time of keeping track of every characters' position in every frame of the movie. When the characters are positioned in each keyframe, the software will generate the in-between positions with a process called "tweening."

6. Add sound. You will need to synchronize your sound files to the action, especially if you want to add dialogue.

7. Test your animation and create the final movie file. Upload it to the web or burn it to CD or DVD to show it to your friends.

Tips & Warnings

• Keep your first animation simple. Focus on one or two characters and one plot line. Limit your animation to two or three scenes. Try to avoid dialogue your first time out, or pare it down to a handful of words. You'd be surprised what you can achieve with simple sound effects. You can develop more complex animations as your skills improve.

• Animators use a technique called onion skinning to draw motion sequences. This involves laying the previous image in a sequence under the new image to use as a reference. Most animation software allows you to mimic this technique.

• Nested sequences allow you to collect a series of frames into a single object. Rather than placing the individual steps involved in walking (or flying) over and over again, you would create the sequence as one animation that loops as many times as you need. Then you would place that animation into the timeline of your main animation.