[John]

I'm trying to do something with Anime Studio.  I have the basic character design, but have quite a few kinks to work out in the animation.  Here's a "simple" (could have fooled me) test animation of a muscle chick doing a long jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPjTSeqYkWM

The drawing style is Family Guy and Simpsons-esque.  Making more characters should be easier, once I get the basics down.  I'm still pretty much a novice at animation.

(BTW, Youtube added some more compression.  The original wasn't that messy-looking, other than the animation flaws) 

[Ashlee]

very good you shold pick up Animation magzines there a ton out there for pointers.
also you should develope Character sheets and a story board the action your going to do, that way you can polish up the the charater and the action.
Very good work.
Hope to see more! 🙂

[Reason]

Wow, this is a great first effort and I'm so glad to see someone else on this board using Anime Studio! That's also some great advice from Ashlee. If you want to create professional looking animation, then why not go through the same steps as the professionals do.

Some people don't realize it, but learning to animate is like learning to draw all over again. The same elements go into creating movement (eg attitude, exaggeration, composition, etc) that that go into creating a single pictur it takes a lot of time to learn how to apply them properly.

As well as the magazines that Ashlee mentioned, there are some great free websites offering Animation Tips and Tricks:
http://www.karmatoons.com/

There are also some great books around. Some of my favorites are:
Character Animation Crash Course
Timing for Animation
CGWorld Special Book

Yes I know the last one is in Japanese, but it has a huge amount of reference sequences in it, so you can still get a lot out of it.

Just like drawing from a reference is really good practice, you could also try animating from a reference, say from YouTube.

[Author]

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