I will go over how I put together animated short films, from story creation to composition. I will be outlining the steps and my personal experiences creating an animation short, called Needles and Thread. For the beginners, you should read and study more about the animation techniques and tools before you starting up. It is best to join a short term animation course and learn the basics and concepts of animation, if possiblle. There are a couple of tutorials are available online, so that you can check out at learn. The tools I used are Adobe photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Audition, Adobe Flash and Captivate
Step 6: Create Dope Sheets
Dope sheets/exposure sheets are very useful because timing is key in animation.A well-prepared dope sheet will help you when you start animating. This is an example of a dope sheet I used for my animation.
Step 7: Create the Rough Animation
After timing the animation you can actually start animating. Start animating roughly. Keep the lines loose and push the poses. Use the key poses you drew in the storyboards.Write down on your dope sheet how many in-betweens you want after clean-up (more on these two processes later). Try to keep characters on separated layers.
Step 8: Clean-up
Once you are happy with your animation, you can start cleaning up the line art.You'll need to decide what type of line you would like to use. There are different types of line art you can choose from. Normal lines are all the same thickness while rough lines are not closed and make your animations look like they are dancing. Cartoony lines are thick around the border with thin lines on the inside. With my animation, I used a normal line because it worked best with the style I was going for. Cleaning up rough animation can be tedious work, but when you do it right it will make inbetweening (which I will talk about in the next step) and coloring much easier.
Step 9: Inbetweening
In-betweens are vital for smooth animation. Keys lead the animation but the in-betweens smooth out the movements. This process is called inbetweening or tweening. You don't always need a ton of in-betweens. When you animate an action shot, you can get away with a few keys and one or two in-betweens. For subtle animation, more in-betweens give you a smoother result. I'll give you an example of an in-between I made using the diagram in the right side.
First I put in number 23 and 31 on a light box.
To add in-betweens to this, you would label it with number 25. Always start with the breakdown. In this case, number 25 is exactly halfway between 23 and 31.
On the light box you start drawing right in between the two lines of those drawings and that is how you create the breakdown.
When you are done, you take drawing number 25 and 31 and you inbetween those to create number 27.
After you are done with that one, you take number 27 and 31 to create the last one in the scene number 29.
Step 10: Digital Inking and Painting of the Backgrounds
Background artwork will need to be added behind your characters using inking. You can ink it the old fashioned way with crayons or paint, or you can scan the artwork and paint it with a program like Photoshop. My backgrounds are a mix of scanned crayons, water paints and Photoshop. It's very important to label all your layers and keep them separate because the animation will be placed in between the layers to create depth.
Step 11: Digital Inking and Painting of the Characters
Once you get to this step, all your animation has been cleaned up, inbetweened and is ready for coloring.When I made my short, I had the privilege of using a scanner specialized for scanning animation. I also used software called Toon Boom to ink all the characters. This program is very easy to use and it made coloring the characters much easier. Now the hard work of clean-up that we did earlier really pays off. With great line work and closed lines, coloring will be a walk in the park. If you have lots of open lines, it will be harder to use the paint bucket tool to fill all animations fast and efficiently.
Step 12: Compositing
When all the artwork and characters are painted you can use Toon Boom to composite it. Compositing is the process of combining all the elements into one scene. You can also use any other program you like to work in. Now you put the whole movie together and make it flow into one.
