i want to make a cartoon 3 min video

Hi
I’m starting by saying i’m a newbie in digital editing for cartoons, and that I started up drawing myself with youtube tutorials and pen and paper in sept 2009. Now I draw pretty good, but when it comes to animation frame-by-frame drawing in TBA it seems that it looks pretty bad.

Characters loose consistency from frame to frame, as I draw it. How is this done actually, the frame-by-frame animation of character ?

I’m thinking of fixing this problem by drawing in Manga Studio EX the frames, export as jpegs and then import and vectorize and paint the character.

But say I only draw the 1st posture of my character in Manga Studio EX or Photoshop (Manga Studio has greater feel in sketching and inking for me)

and then, based on that character I draw the other postures.

Do you encourage duplicating the frames and deleting only the moving parts ? this way I think the character will have a continuous feeling when playing the frames.

I don’t want to use cutout animation when I cut parts and attach to peg, I want real feeling like Manga animation, frame by frame.

How do you encourage me doing this (aside drawing all frame from 0 in Manga Studio EX and import/vector them).

thanks

I will also use landscapes I will create mostly hand-drawn and painted in Photoshop as backgrounds.

thanks

What I would recommend is making a character sheet. Which is basically a drawing of what your character/characters look like from different angles, which you use as reference.

Another thing you can do is instead of animating each frame in order (straight ahead animation) which is very difficult to keep consistent, I would recommend you draw out your key frames first.

If you don’t know what a key frame is then here is a short explanation.
Lets say you want to animate someone turning their head. The first keyframe, would be them looking to the left, the second keyframe would be them looking to the right. And it has about 5 frames in between for the animation. So its basically what their position is before and after the movement. Of course if the character is doing more complicated movements, then you will want to add more key frames to smooth things out.

Hope this helps.

Edit:
Also, start with something simple for your first animation, and then gradually move to more complex and ambitious animations.