Simple Animation Program for Mac (Or even Windows!)

Doctor Suarez said:

Hi. I'm looking for a simple 2-D animation program that will allow me to essentially make what looks like cutout animation, like Terry Gilliam's work, or South Park before they went to Maya.

Cost is a factor, so the cheaper the better, so long as it's functional and not for children.

The only program I have found so far is Anime Studio 5. Is this a good option? Are there others?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

I can think of nothing cheap or free that will do this, but I am sure there are.

Adobe After Effects
Flash

come to mind immediately

Doctor Suarez said:

Hi. I'm looking for a simple 2-D animation program that will allow me to essentially make what looks like cutout animation, like Terry Gilliam's work, or South Park before they went to Maya.

Cost is a factor, so the cheaper the better, so long as it's functional and not for children.

The only program I have found so far is Anime Studio 5. Is this a good option? Are there others?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

What about "Blender". Maybe a bit of overkill for 2D but you can define all your wire frame object to be on a plane.
http://www.blender.org

Well, I'm not a master animator, and the animation I have done is all "traditional" stop motion work with clay, but the Anime Studio 5 you referenced seems like the right tool for what you want to do, and it's only $40 on Amazon, so quite affordable, compared to the other tools.

I may even snag a copy to do the mouth/eye/other facial animation on my stop motion stuff... the lip syncing feature would be a HUGE time saver over trying to hand animate mouths frame by frame, plus let me make quick changes to the script after the animation is all shot. EDIT: Nice, the lip sync package is GPL'd and free for download, which saves me $40.

Anyways, I think you answered your own question!

If you are looking for REALLY simple animation you could try animated gifs... but that is for veyr basic animation.

Try Pencil. Its free, and seemingly easy to use.