How to Make Computer Animations

Computer animation holds many things in common with more traditional styles of the art, but making computer animation also involves the use of technology. Blending the two can be a little tricky, but a few quick steps and you'll blend the pen and pixels with the best of them.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Decide on the approach you're going to take. For those who are less technically inclined, there's plenty of drag-and-drop movie production software. Some you can simply demo at no expense. Using a programming language, if you're so inclined, you can sequence the events by when in time you want the image to appear, relative to the start of the program. You can even decide frame rate by determining the intervals between images.

2. Prepare your frames. Assuming that you've already storyboarded a sequence and that you simply need to get it into an animated form on computer, this means either scanning and polishing some work or rendering it into a format like .gif or .jpg. Most graphics packages offer a conversion to or have their own animation format.

3. Sequence your frames with whatever tool you've chosen. The idea is to give a smooth feeling of motion, so attempt to order them that way.

4. Test your animation by playing it by either running your program or using the tool to play it. Make sure that it shows what you intended and that no frames have been dropped accidentally.

Tips & Warnings

• Use a free Internet tool to run sequencing, even if you plan on animating the final product using programming code. It helps keep things straight before you test, keeping the phase down in time.

Resources

• List of freeware animation tools.
• Toonboom Demo.