I LIKE drawing, as you might have noticed, so the South Park style cut-out animation that I associate with Anime Studio never appealed to me; I’d rather laboriously draw every frame, however I had an e-mail offer and decided to give the beginner’s version, Anime Studio Debut 8 a try.
Apart from the Quick Start Tutorial that comes with the program, this is my first attempt at an animation. I wanted to try importing images (File/Import/Image), converting my scanned sketches into vector graphics (Draw/Trace Image).
In Anime automated animation works smoothly, for example the way the fish and the jellyfish move and diminish in size, but any manipulations that I make, such as moving the crabs claws and the waving of the frond of ‘seaweed’, need a degree of forward planning and care if they’re not going to look as jerky and awkward as they do here. However I feel that I’ve grasped the basics and hope that I can do something more creative with it.
This title and the soundtrack were added when I uploaded the clip to YouTube but you can do that in Anime too.