Other Useful Tutorials for Animation
These tutorials, some put together by other About.com guides, will give you a start on a few other useful programs to help out with your animation endeavors.
The first step in learning to use Toon Boom Animate? Walking through the installation process, which is fairly simple and should only take you a few minutes.
Use SnagIt and your favorite graphics program to create a recorded "animation" of your brush strokes as you draw.
Before you start animating, it's a good idea to draw up a character sheet/character breakdown of the subject of your animation, both for reference and to familiarize you with drawing different views. Let's take a look at the basics for a character sheet.
The first step in starting off your animation is to get your basic motion down. For that you don't need perfect drawings; you can use stick figures, as long as they capture your basic proportions and get your motion down. Grab your light desks and get ready to go.
With the rough animated motion out of the way, let's get started on the detailed art by sketching it on top of the stick-figure roughs.
Once your detailed in-betweens are done, you can start retracing with clean black lines. Believe it or not, you can start adding depth to your animation even in this step, without color, highlight, or shadow - just by using varying line weights to create the illusion of depth.
This is a helpful list of tutorials by other About.com guides on Photoshop, HTML editors, and video editing that will help you as peripheral resources when publishing your Flash work.
This is just a quick dip at the trot, a basic checklist of things to do for those comfortable with Visual Basic; this isn't intended to be a full step-by-step, but more a basic overview as to the steps inherent in creating an easy 2D animated screen saver using the language.
