Yes, a lot of work for a few frames of finished animation. Over the years, animators have employed a wide variety of techniques to try to get around the amount of work necessary. The most basic of these is the use of holds, which you'll still see in Flash animation today. Whenever a character does not move in a frame, the same drawing from the previous frame is used - the pose is "held." Limited animation techniques break a single character into multiple parts whenever possible and only animate the part(s) that move(s). You can see examples of this in Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Scooby-Doo; you'll notice a slight color difference between a part that's going to move and one that isn't.

Another technique is loops, and pretty much everyone still uses this today, from hand-drawn animation to 3D. Once a cycle of animation is completed, the same frames are reused over and over for as long as the animation is needed. Again, the Hanna-Barbera cartoons (famous for their use of limited animation to lower production costs for television animation, though critics bemoan the loss of animation quality) demonstrate this: Fred Flintstone running, Scooby-Doo and the gang running...

A unique technique I learned about recently, practiced by Anatoly Petrov - though I can't find any references now - involved painting a scene on glass, photographing it, then painting the next frame by adjusting the paint before it dries. Obviously, only so many frames can be created this way (and absolutely no scene changes), but the results can be quite impressive:

">Firing Range.

Digital tools are still just tools. It is important to have a firm grasp of drawing and animation principles to use them effectively, which is part of why I voraciously consume all information I can get about them.

Oluseyi: Dude you made my day. Two pieces of software and a badass video! Thanks go to you.

Always glad to help. [smile]

Actually you can do this all in Flash, onionskin tweening (for bitmaps too), it's all there.

What I do is;

1-draw stuff in Flash and convert them to symbols-graphics
2-or draw them in photoshop and import them in Flash.
1-2-contn.-if it's a character, draw every limp seperatly
3-assmeble the character in the first frame on the timeline
4-copy that frame (alt+drag on timeline)
5-manipulate the new frame
6-repeat steps 4 and 5 a lot.

Hi there. I know another product that is cheap and does the same things you mentioned. It's called Paint Shop Pro 8, can be found at www.amazon.com, and comes with animation software called Animation Shop. It can do frame by frame animaton, with or without onion skinning, and has two animation wizards, one for text and banners, and one for picture animations where you select your images in order, and it will make them into one animation for you.Paint Shop Pro 8 (it's an older version), and Animation Shop go really well together, because one is for drawing, and the other is for animating. I know that they are both really easy to use because I have both. With Animation Shop, you can add lots of pre-animated effects and customize them too.

Happy to help
-Spludge Interactive