Animation Tutorial

Getting Started with Web Animation

In the lessons to come, we'll be diving deeply into a variety of animation formats. But today we'll start by just getting your feet wet. Here are some general guidelines to help you negotiate the fast-moving waters of animation — specifically, how to decide what kind of animation is best for your purposes.

Make Sure Your Animation Has a Theme/Story/Point

Whether the point of your animation is simply the beauty of color in motion or the telling of a feature-length tale, it's important to keep the goal of your "story" in mind as you animate. It will make all the difference in quality.

Be Inventive

When it comes to animation on the Internet, almost anything's possible - as long as you keep an open mind and continue to explore new ways to get your ideas across. In this tutorial, we've included several tips and tricks that we use at HotWired to enhance the performance of our animations. We encourage you to develop your own as you learn from our mistakes. You can also pick up great pointers just from checking out animations that you find on the Web.

Plan Ahead

No matter what you're working on, epic adventure or three-frame animation, it always helps to storyboard. For a good example, try on The Wrong Trousers. Your storyboards don't have to be works of art, just clear enough to get your ideas across to yourself and anyone else who may be involved in the process (if you're working with a client, though, you may need to refine your drawings a bit so that they don't get tense about your abilities). This is the time to play around: Visualize how everything's going to look, experiment with different angles and styles, and generally work out all the kinks. Trust us, this will save you a lot of time down the road.

You can do your storyboarding right there on the computer, but you may be better off old-schooling it with pencils, pens, and paper. These tried-and-true tools keep your work fast and loose; sketch things out on the computer, and you may be tempted to waste your time tweaking things to unnecessary perfection.