I spent a good deal of yesterday going over some basic concepts of animation with my nine year old niece, Skye. We started with the most simple stuff...comparing a ball moving frame by frame vs. using a blur effect for a sense of speed. By the end of the day she created her own simple GIF looped animation in Photoshop and ImageReady. I could open the image right here, but it may be a little distracting to have running nonstop on the post. Check it out here.
I was hoping to start the opening credits to "Eight" during my trip, but my brand new just out of the box (however---unfortunately not unpacked out of that box until after the exchange deadline at Office Depot) computer is busted during my travels (I was careful...not sure where or when it was damaged. My sister thinks the shell feels too lightweight and not really suitable for travel, despite it being a laptop. Who knows.)
So, my buddy/ex sis in law/niece's mama is lending me her reliable if smaller and less memory/RAM old sony laptop for the time being. I loaded my old Adobe CS on it and am looking at freeware/inexpensive animation programs. I was going to just go with what I used on Four (see second animation to your left on this here website)- Photostage Slideshow. However, I will be using a lot of rotation effects which it doesn't provide. I may use it for certain kinds of editing, but am considering a freeware 3d software in order to combine a 2-d characters with more traditional types of animation effects with a 3-d landscape environment. If this computer has roomI will download and test some programs out like Blender to see how easy or difficult it is to use for a fairly newbie animator.
