Make Your Own Cartoon

Are you an artistic Person? You know the kind of person who spent most of their time in school doodling rather than taking notes or someone who really enjoys telling stories or creating characters.

If you answered yes to any of those questions then making your own cartoon just might be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding things you'll ever do.

It doesn't require that much to make your own cartoon.

All you need is:

• The desire to make your own cartoon

• An animation program such as Macromedia Flash or Toon Boom (both of which you can Download for free just Google them)

• A little artistic talent

• And an imagination

Once you have these things your ready to start making your own cartoon.

Make your own cartoon in 5 stages

There are 5 major stages that you need to go through to make your own cartoon.

1. Story

You need to have a basic series of events that will happen in your cartoon. This can be as detailed as a full length film or as simple as something moving from one point to the other. Either way you at least need to have a rough idea of what the point of the cartoon is and how you're going to get there.

2. Characters

Now that you know who and what you need to get the point of you story across to your audience, its time to design your characters. It is important to make sure that your characters will be easily animated. If you make your characters to detailed it will take way to much work to animate them and you may get discouraged and abandon the project.

3. Story board

Now that you have your story line and characters ready you can start story boarding your cartoon. For those of you who don't know what story boarding is it is a series of pictures that depict the main events of your story. I usually start by doing a different drawing for each scene. Then I go back and do storyboarding for each scene that needs more than one image to depict what its going to show.

4. Sound

Now is the time to record the sound for your cartoon. Depending on how much your cartoon depends on the sound to carry the story forward you may actually want to record your soundtrack before you storyboard. And then make the storyboard follow the sound. However most of my animations rely mainly on the visual aspect rather than the audio ( there isn't any dialogue in most my cartoons) so I record the sounds to follow along with my story board.

5. Animate

And now for the final step in making your own cartoon, the animation step. Your animation style will greatly affect this step but here are some basic guide lines.

Firstly you would want to choose a scene, in this scene you should have already decided on the cameras perspective in the story board stage.

You will then draw the background and map the lighting, after which you will draw the all the key frames (the frames where the extreme poses happen) and then do the inbetweening (the frames between the keyframes).

Keep in mind that you do not add color to the animation until you have gotten the movement to exactly where you want to be. After your done drawing all the frames and the scene is running smoothly you will add the base color to your character.