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Hello!
I was wondering if anyone here is into animation? Or is going to school for animation? Because I've been working on a cartoon recently and I have no idea how to animate or anything. I want to know if there's anyway I could get into it/learn it by myself or if I should go take a class? Because I really want this to go someplace and the one thing I'm missing is the animation part :'C
ALSO if anyone would be willing to help me at all, then I wouldn't have to worry about it at all, lol. But I would also like to get a team together on this, to help with episodes and characters and whatnot. Unless that sort of thing is too difficult to do when we're miles and miles apart…
I don't know D:
Annnndddd I don't feel comfortable talking about the cartoon itself in the forums, because I'm self-conscious about it, lol. So if you have questions about that please message me!
Thanks~ <3

Relevant
Helps somewhat.

I've been frequenting Newgrounds in and out for about 7 years, but that doesn't make me Stephen Hillenburg.

Give this thread more time, we have animators around here.

Well, I'm looking for perfection!
But thank you c:

This is funny, because I made animation the other day.

It's choppy as heck, has a few errors, etc.

But I had fun while I did it, you know? Don't go into animation thinking every frame has to be like a da Vinci painting. People won't notice a lot of effort you're gonna painstakingly put into each frame. (In other words, treat your audience as if they're dumb.) If I'm not in a good mood while I make it, I feel like I've accomplished NOTHING. And you don't want to be miserable when you're doing your job.

… But seriously though, keep in mind that as a typical animator, you won't be the creative mind behind most of it. You won't be making the story. At most, you'll decide how a character should look. (But even then, character designers and story boarders might have the upper hand.) You could also be working with other animators as well. (Back in the day, animators would draw only every third frame.) Make sure you're a good team player. Every job has some element of working together.

Also, are you interested in 3D Animation, or 2D Animation? Today's market hates 2-Dimensional artwork. Not like it should deter you. It just means you'll have to work harder to find work.

Remember though: I am no expert animator. Most of that stuff up there is either opinion, or what I remember hearing about the profession. So really, the best advice I can give you is the generic "Practice Makes Perfect".

I'm thinking you should take a class and get some tips.

Good luck,
- Joe

I meant to say I'm not looking for perfection, by the waaay…

Did someone say… animation?

If you really want to get into it, I recommend reading The Animator's Survival Kit. It has tons of helpful stuff to get you going that applies to all mediums.
There is one thing about it that I've discovered works better a different way: instead of putting the passing position in the middle and mirroring the easing on both sides, have the passing postion favor the starting extreme and put more space between it and the next postion. This way, each position is spaced differently from the previous position. (Once you read the book, you'll understand it.)

What medium do you want to do?
Hand-drawn ("classical")? Stop-motion? 2-D computer (Flash or a similar program)? 3-D computer (toughest one to learn, by the way)?
Personally, I've tried all of them. I started out doing stop-motion, I'm in the process of learning Flash (taking a class at school), I tried hand-drawn a while back, and I attempted to learn Blender (3-D software, turned out to be too technical for my tastes).

I could help with stuff like story ideas/scriptwriting, character design, storyboarding, animation, and voice acting.

Tip: ANIMATION TAKES FOREVER. Any animation project is a major undertaking, if you want it to look actually good. But the time is worth it, and hard work shows. Make sure you absolutely LOVE whatever it is you're animating, because you're going to be drawing a ton of it. Seriously. Get others to help, but they'd better love it, too, or else you'd better have deep pockets.

Learn the essentials. CLICK HERE for an overview. I highly recommend the book mentioned there, The Illusion of Life. It's written by the guys who basically invented the art back in the 30s.

I honestly have no idea what I want! D:
I also have no idea what you're saying to me…but that's okay xD

I would love if you could help me out at all. Right now, I only have characters and part of their backgrounds/who they are.

Message me if you'd like to know more about it! c:

Thanks~

Okay thanks!

Yeah I heard that if you're going to make a cartoon you better have a simple character that can be drawn over and over again, but that's all I know…

I'll totes check out every book there is, haha. Maybe there's even an "Animation for Dummies" book out there waiting for me o:

The only time I actually animated anything was making Gifs for myself in gimp.

I like animating in Photoshop and Flash. I use CS4.

Here there be ponies. Ye have been warned. The song was actually written by a fellow KYMite.

I like to think of myself as a fairly competent Flash animator. I had dabbled in woeful traditional animation until about last spring, when I pirated acquired Flash CS5 and started playing around with that. I moved cross country during the summer, so I lost a good three months of work and didn't get back to it around August, and even then I still didn't know much. Luckily, us ponyfags do something called the Artist Training Grounds in August, in which artists respond to a daily prompt for the whole month. I had some terrible Flash builds at the time, so I went through and made a short animation every day. It turned out well enough, but I learned a lot about animating.

Basically, it comes down to this: I had no formal training and all I did was watch a couple YouTube videos halfway through. I didn't read a single book or take a single class. Just experiment. See if any of your favorite animators make their Flash builds public, like the MLP builds are. You don't have to use them (I hate the thought of using someone else's Flash builds), but honestly, just play around with them. See how things work together, how the arms and legs work or the facial expressions. It's sort of a mindset: I spend a lot of my day just doing simple thought experiments, wondering how I could draw a new motion without making too many new resources.

I don't know if you're planning on using Flash, but I'd highly recommend it. In terms of style preferences, it's the best. I like my animation to be bright and vibrant with a lot of subtle attention to detail and a lot of focus on background design. It's art, after all. Personally, I'm not a fan of how hand-drawn animation looks, and, no offense, 3-d animation is too easy to be lazy with. Honestly, Disney and Pixar movies are the only good 3-d animation springing to mind right now.

And don't worry, after months of using a pirated copy, I finally bought it in October.

I don't know about you, but I think I'll need books and maybe even a teacher to help me learn how to do this.
I'd rather be a pro and know everything I can know. I mean, we're different people and different things work for different people.
I would also be really really lost in flash, because yeah. That stuff doesn't come easy to me :c

But thanks for the advice and junk! c: