Bluntly, I’m sorry to say, forget it. Tom and Jerry is traditional animation. The equivalent would be taking a paint program and drawing the individual cells in that then compiling and animating them. Actually that is possible using first a paint program like Photoshop, Corel Draw, Paintshop Pro or the Gimp, then the imagemagick suite of command line tools for the final compilation into an mpeg you can edit, add a soundtrack to or whatever in any movie editor.
Blender is a 3D animation program. It was originally the in-house software for a now-defunct Amsterdam animation house and while quite good is better suited to movies like Lord of the Rings, Golden Compass or Carz than it is to Tom And Jerry type films.
Synfig is a not very good vector drawing program with complicated animation tools. It is, like Blender and Gimp, also Open Source. You would be better off learning to use tools like Adobe Illustrator or the also Open Source Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) which I’ve used to create jpegs I’ve compiled an animation from. But Vector Drawing programs are better suited to Mr. Magoo or Gerald McBoingBoing than to Tom and Jerry.
Dead End October 10, 2013
Ignore jplatt39. Just because he isn’t aware of what 2D software exists for doing traditional animation does’t mean it doesn’t exist. He lists digital image editing software which feature minimal animation tools and features that are more suited to creating gifs for web design, and a 3D program which features over-complicated features and interface.
Some of the better commercial 2D animation programs such as Digicel Flipbook, Toon Boom, TVPaint, TAB, and PAP, have Student or Express versions that are fairly inexpensive. However, you might be disappointed by how crippled these stripped down programs are compared to their more expensive Pro versions. But if you look hard enough you should be able to find them cracked online (rapidshare, bittorrent). There are some free alternatives.
If you’re doing old school drawn on paper frame by frame stuff or stop-motion or 2D, I’d suggest MonkeyJam. It’s free.
If you want to do Flash animation like the stuff on Newgrounds.com, either break down and buy Adobe Flash or you can try Creatoon or Synfig, which are free. They’re not Flash, but they also do vector based symbol oriented
animation.
Free one.
Bluntly, I’m sorry to say, forget it. Tom and Jerry is traditional animation. The equivalent would be taking a paint program and drawing the individual cells in that then compiling and animating them. Actually that is possible using first a paint program like Photoshop, Corel Draw, Paintshop Pro or the Gimp, then the imagemagick suite of command line tools for the final compilation into an mpeg you can edit, add a soundtrack to or whatever in any movie editor.
Blender is a 3D animation program. It was originally the in-house software for a now-defunct Amsterdam animation house and while quite good is better suited to movies like Lord of the Rings, Golden Compass or Carz than it is to Tom And Jerry type films.
Synfig is a not very good vector drawing program with complicated animation tools. It is, like Blender and Gimp, also Open Source. You would be better off learning to use tools like Adobe Illustrator or the also Open Source Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) which I’ve used to create jpegs I’ve compiled an animation from. But Vector Drawing programs are better suited to Mr. Magoo or Gerald McBoingBoing than to Tom and Jerry.
Ignore jplatt39. Just because he isn’t aware of what 2D software exists for doing traditional animation does’t mean it doesn’t exist. He lists digital image editing software which feature minimal animation tools and features that are more suited to creating gifs for web design, and a 3D program which features over-complicated features and interface.
Some of the better commercial 2D animation programs such as Digicel Flipbook, Toon Boom, TVPaint, TAB, and PAP, have Student or Express versions that are fairly inexpensive. However, you might be disappointed by how crippled these stripped down programs are compared to their more expensive Pro versions. But if you look hard enough you should be able to find them cracked online (rapidshare, bittorrent). There are some free alternatives.
If you’re doing old school drawn on paper frame by frame stuff or stop-motion or 2D, I’d suggest MonkeyJam. It’s free.
http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam
If you’re on a Mac, use Pencil(there’s PC and Linux versions as well).
http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php
If you want to do Flash animation like the stuff on Newgrounds.com, either break down and buy Adobe Flash or you can try Creatoon or Synfig, which are free. They’re not Flash, but they also do vector based symbol oriented
animation.
http://www.creatoon.com/index.php
http://www.synfig.org/
Here are some online resources about the basic principles of animation.
http://www.idleworm.com/how/index.shtml
http://www.awn.com/tooninstitute/lessonplan/lesson.htm
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/media-preston-blairs-animation-first.html
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/media-preston-blairs-animation-1st.html
http://www.karmatoons.com/drawing/1a.htm
http://www.animationarena.com/principles-of-animation.html
http://w ww.animationmeat.com/notes/notes.html