animated shorts

December 18, 2005 9:38 AM

I would like to make 'experimental' animated shorts using some of my own abstract drawings (scanned) and various other image-sources (miniDV, pictures, etc). I do not seek to animate cartoon characters (although that could happen on rare occasions). What animation software would be best for me?

the key word for me is 'experimental', playing with images, composing moving images and adding backgrounds (abstract or realistic). I would try sometimes to put a fun narrative on these images afterwards...

posted by amusem to Technology (9 answers total)

There are many factors involved (cost, delivery-method, etc.), but you can create quality animations in many applications. If your goal is to play your animations on the web, you might want to look into a Flash-based solution. Sure, you can play quicktime/AVI/REAL files on the web, but you have to continually worry about whether people have the appropriate players. Whereas almost everyone has the Flash player. So-called "Flash movies" are actually SWF files, and they can be generated by many applications -- not just Macromedia Flash. Check out www.swftools.com for a complete rundown. I'm pretty fond of Toon Book Studio, Koolmoves (super cheap!) and Mojo. One (possible) negative: Flash's internal drawing tools are all vector-based. You will be able to import your scans into Flash (or some other Flash-like app), but you won't be able to edit them in Flash. For that, you'll need something like Photoshop, Photo-Paint, Paint Shop Pro or Gimp.

My favorite animation tool is Adobe After Effects. But it's more expensive than Flash and, though it can output SWF files, it doesn't do so very well. It's much better at outputting standard video files (i.e Quicktime/AVI).

Neither Flash nor After Effects have much support for 3D (Flash has ZERO support and AE has just a little 3D capability -- which some people jokingly refer to as 2.5D). So if you want to get into 3D animation (i.e. "Toy Story"), you'll need a different app. The major players are Maya, SoftImage, 3DStudioMax and Lightwave. These apps are all expensive and hard to learn. There are powerful, cheaper solutions, like Animation:Magic and Cinema4G XL. There are also free solutions, like Blender.
posted by grumblebee at 10:16 AM on December 18, 2005

I'd recommend Adobe After Effects for you too. You'll be able to do all sorts of movements with your scanned images and video. There are also numerous plug-ins that come with After Effects that will allow you to manipulate your footage.

Also think about the final output for your animation. Planning is the key here. Will you be showing this on TV? On film? Or just online? You'll need to choose the right resolution to start at. Remember you can always downsample, but upsampling is a big no-no (you'll be very disappointed).

Regarding Flash, while many online animators love to use it, it is a terrible tool in terms of the professional video world. It's fantastic for online, but that's about it. It's also difficult to go from Flash to video.

Good luck.
posted by lunarboy at 11:10 AM on December 18, 2005

Flash has ZERO support (for 3d)
Flash doesn't have any support for 3d, but there are 3rd party plugins (full blown apps?) that will let you do rotoscoped/cell shaded looking 3d and spit it out in vector/swf format.
posted by juv3nal at 2:25 PM on December 18, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks a bunch grumblebee, lunarboy and juv3nal. what I hope to achieve is good video art that can be shown to friends and maybe programmed in one or two festivals. I realize After effects is really attractive. there is a lot of substance in these three posts so i'm printing it and pondering-pondering.
posted by amusem at 3:39 PM on December 18, 2005

try apple final cut or adobe premiere pro, don't try flash for this purpose (it's gay and will limit you), take a look at discreet combustion (it's "the new flash"^^)
posted by suni at 5:04 PM on December 18, 2005

Flash is gay? I didn't know it had any sort of sexual preference.

You can actually make very sophisticated animations in Flash, if you know what you're doing. There are now TV shows (e.g. on "The Cartoon Network") being animated in Flash. Flash format (swf) is the easiest to deploy on the web. Flash 8 -- the latest version -- supports complex, curve-based easing ("easing" is the animator's term for acceleration/deceleration), which greatly improves it as an animation tool.

While I champion After Effects, I think Final Cut and Premiere Pro are odd choices for animation (but I LOVE both those applications and I even wrote a book about Premiere Pro). They are video-editing programs (NLEs) with a LITTLE animation animation capability. I've never heard of a serious animator who uses either as their main tool.
posted by grumblebee at 5:44 PM on December 18, 2005

Also, how is Combustion "the new flash"? Flash is a vector-based animation program, created for making lightweight web animations (it's also a fairly sophisticated programming tool). Combustion is a animation/compositing tool for Post-production (video/film) work. The two are pretty much apples and oranges. Combustion's competition is After Effects, not Flash.

By the way, if you have it in your budget, consider Flash AND After Effects. Both are owned by Adobe, now (Adobe just acquired Macromedia), and there will be some sweet interoperability in the future -- starting with the next version of the two apps.

Not to completely dismiss Combustion, it's a sophisticated compositing application, and, since it's owned by Discreet, it plays nicely with 3D Studio Max (although After Effects plays pretty well with it too).

Just to throw everything and the kitchen sink at you, if you're a Mac user, you should have a look at Apple's new animation program, Motion. It's currently 2D-only, but it's pretty cool. After Effects can do tons of things that Motion can't (at the moment), but what Motion can do, it does really well and much more easily that After Effects.
posted by grumblebee at 5:51 PM on December 18, 2005

grumble: i'm just suggesting looking at and trying, and "experimental" animations sounds pretty opposite to flash animations
posted by suni at 4:02 AM on December 19, 2005

I would reccomend Flash 5 and Gimp. After Effects is a tad bit overkill and hard to learn but you can do a lot more weird stuff with it. Flash is easy to master and its strength is that there's only so much you can do, but it's got enough tricks up its sleeve. I'd try out version 5, much easier to work with in regards to animating. If you want to be obscure, try Gimp w/ the GAP plugin, also if your thinking of mixing up the 3d- Blender might do what you want.
posted by psychobum at 6:42 AM on December 19, 2005