animation programs

[Tiff]

what program would be best to use for an animation, similar to sphinx's "a brief history of our time"?

[phil marlowe]

ms paint

[Tiff]

then how do u put them in fast sequence n shit?

[Raikus]

Macromedia Flash MX would be the easiest.

[sphinx]

i used adobe photoshop to draw each and every frame in BHOT.  granted, that isn't to say that i redrew every single frame over and over again.  i used layers so that i could have a static background layer and an animated foreground layer.  sometimes individual stickmen would have multiple layers so i could just animate their faces/arms/legs without worrying about the rest of their body.  the 3d shots were accomplished just through imagning what the finished shot would look like in my mind and trying to get that on the computer.  also, i referenced numerous cubes/three dimensional shapes around me to see how lines of a shape move when the perspective changes, because it's something that you really don't think about much.

then used jasc's animation shop to composite all the frames (fast sequence n shit), which was quite a load on my computer considering that there were almost 1000 frames or so, and when you wanted to preview the animation it would run it off your memory, so i didn't have a clue what the whole thing would look like until i compiled it all, which takes about half an hour, sometimes.  i don't think i could have gotten nearly the same results with something like flash, but it certainly is a very effective animating tool, having used it before.  i guess i wanted more control over the movement of my animation as opposed to relying on motion tweens, but the compromise there is tedious amounts of animating.  you'd need a few bags of chocolate, coffee, cocaine, or something to hype you up while animate, because it can get pretty boring sometimes.  i dunno.