Got any tips for beginning animators? Like how to get started, and what program you think is best?
Firstly, thank you for thinking I would have good tips for learning to animate :D I'm going to use this ask for a brief animation tutorial if you don't mind~
I guess to begin, its always good to start with learning about the basics -> the ball bounce.
Even though this seems super simple (you might even want to skip it), learning how to do a proper one will teach you a good chunk of the techniques you need to animate smoothly.
Here's a gif of a ball bounce I just did. The red outlines on the right are the frames that are most important in animation, called extremes (or key frames). Every other frame of drawing are inbetweens, the spacing of these inbetweens will determine how fast or slow your animation appears to be moving.
When a ball is bouncing (irl) notice it isn't moving at the same speed all the way through it's bounce? When it shoots up from the ground it's moving pretty fast up until gravity starts to slow it down. This means the ball is slower near the top of it's arc, right before it begins to fall back down. Basically, if you were to take a picture every second of this ball bouncing, you'd see more of it near the area where it's slowing down in one place- and less of it in the areas where it's moving fast. Therefore, the inbetween frames consist of drawings that are closer together where the ball is slowing down, and farther apart where the ball is moving faster. *You can apply this to nearly every single animation you will ever do, it's key to the tricking the brain into believing your animation*
Other than timing and spacing out the inbetweens, posing the extremes and timing these out properly is going to take care of a good chunk of the animation's heavy lifting. These extremes will help you figure out the plan for the animation, either using them as a guideline for beats in the movement or as a storyboard of sorts.
I didn't really follow my own rough extreme's exactly as I added more details to the character's movements, but they helped in keeping track of the size of the character and the timing.
**You don't need a lot of tweens to get an animation looking "smooth"- as long as you implement techniques such as overshooting and following-through with your secondary action (I'll go over that in a second) then you will be A-ok.**
This animation originally started with just 4 frames looping and looking fairly static. Until adding in some overshoot. Overshooting is when you have an action and the motion goes further than what the action required. In this case, the arm goes a tad further in it's motion and bounces back to where it was originally supposed to be. This makes the animation more punchy or impactful and is usually seen in "pose-to-pose" animations.
Lastly, Secondary Action is usually for things on an object that isn't doing the initial motion. In this case, I added a sleeve. With no secondary action, the sleeve just matches with the arm's motion- but in reality, when you wear a sleeve it lags behind. If you watch the last square, you might notice the sleeve has to catch up with the arm until it stops, leaving the sleeve to wiggle in place afterwards. (You could even push secondary action a step further by making the wrist turn, causing the hand to lag behind the arm's motion- might make your arm look a little less strong, though)
Sorry about all that text, though it's only scratching the surface of techniques and possibilities with animation.
As for programs, I know:
Clip Studio Paint has a great animation feature, ToonBoom is generally the industry standard (not free but there's a student version), Adobe Animate is convenient to learn on (but Adobe wants to consume your wallet in return) there's a free trial though- and it's also vector only, OpenToonz is a bit more complicated to figure out for it's UI but it's open source and has been used by many a Ghibli movie (There's a professional version called Toonz), Pencil 2d is very basic and easy to use (was the first one I used... other than trying to animate in MS Paint and Movie Maker), and TvPaint is my current darling (easy to learn and versatile for color and texture but not free)
Hope this is useful to somebody out there, and thanks again for asking :)
