Animated Greeting Cards: make a MOVING;) piece of art, for yourself or someone you love.

I recommend choosing a phrase that’s 3 words or less, such as “I miss you,’ ‘Happy Birthday,’ ‘Congratulations!,’ ‘Thinking of You,’ or even simply, ‘HEY!:)’

You can make an animated greeting card for a specific person, or make a general message you can use in multiple contexts. For example, ‘Thank you’ is a great versatile message you can use in emails, texts, or even feature on your website.

Steps:

Pick your phrase (1-5 words, keep it simple)
Pick your color scheme. Limiting your color palette helps save time in the coloring process.
Pick an object or theme. What activities does your crd's recipient like? What do YOU enjoy drawing? Worms? Flowers? Spirals? Lines? Dots? The first step is to look around you for some inspiration; I recommend taking a walk, or checking out your local library, or even a bit of window shopping can inspire creativity.
Pick your medium. For my first ‘I miss you’ animation, I used pen and watercolor. For my second ‘I miss you’ animation, I tapped into my inner child and used crayon-like pastels. Choosing a messy medium helped me avoid any perfectionist tendencies. ;-)
Pick your paper. A paper with lots of texture can be fun because the texture of the paper will animate from frame-to-frame, adding visual interest, without you having to do extra work!

Advice:

If you are a beginning animator, I recommend choosing art supplies that you are already comfortable with, so that you can focus on learning to animate frame-by-frame, rather than dealing with new art supplies.
However, if you’re more experienced, a new art medium can help open up your creativity. If trying out those new brush pens will bring joy to this project, then by all means, do it!:)
Keep it simple, for example: use only one object that’s easy to draw and move around, rather than try to keep track of dozens of objects. OR, instead of an object, just draw blobs that you can make move around!:)
An exercise I created for my college students in Animation 101 involved each student having limited supplies and time: one piece of charcoal, 24 pieces of paper, and 2 hours. SO MUCH cool work that came out of that project!:)
Let’s say you pick an eye that blinks or a bird who flaps her wings. Think of an easy action that only has 2 poses, like a blink, or 3 poses: a beak open/mid/close, or wings in/mid/out.
Animation gets more fun the more you practice. Let's get started!!!

Equipment and Software:

You need something to capture each frame of your animation. Suitable methods of capture: photography, scanning. Suitable devices: phone, tablet, camera, DSLR camera, scanner, Xerox machine:)
If you are using a tablet or phone to capture, there are animation apps such as Stop Motion Pro that act as a one-stop-shop for photographing, compositing, and exporting your final animation. You won’t need to worry about Dragonframe or the Adobe Creative Suite.
If you are using a DSLR camera, Dragonframe Stop Motion is an excellent piece of software that connects to your camera’s live feed. It’s designed specifically for pro stop-motion animators, and I’m a longtime fan. :) You can export your animation right out of Dragonframe, or you can choose to import your photos into Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, or Premiere to composite.
I will continue to make Skillshare courses that go into depth with all these programs and methods, but for this class, I have chosen to give a straightforward introduction to compositing animation frames in Adobe After Effects. If you are brand-new to animation, I recommend downloading Stop Motion Studio or another mobile app, so that you can make a faster jump from idea to Animated Greeting Card.

Anne Beal

Animation Filmmaker

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