How to make an animated short film

November 10, 2021

How to make an animated short film

As you all know about the 2d and 3d animation industry, how it is booming these days and because of that there are many money making opportunities opens in that industry, kids learning also done by the animation only and even in a small advertisement animation is required, so I am here to tell you how I made my first stick figure animated movie and by following the same steps you can also perform the same.

My short film is about the law of karma, in this a scene of Diwali is there one kid firing and throwing cracker on the people and in the next fire the rocket went to his own home he asked for help but no one came and his house getting burnt, you can watch this short film here

Things that you need for animation

1. Sheet of papers :- For drawing mainly for very smooth animation we draw 25 drawing for one second of animation but we can draw 12 drawing for a second also.

Paper link :- https://amzn.to/3krAkw9

2. pen, pencil etc. :- For drawing

Link :- https://amzn.to/3ooJdYS

3. camera stand, camera :- To capture the pic of drawings, make sure you make boundary in your page and click pic of inside the boundary only so all the drawing are in same alignment, and adjust the camera only once in the starting and leave it undisturbed for all the drawing.

Link :- https://amzn.to/3n3Vrqh

4. Monkey jam software :- To render the film

Software link :- https://monkeyjam.org/download

5. Light box :- Keep the paper above it and continue the drawing on the next paper by have a look on the first paper.

Light box link :- https://amzn.to/3n3Vrqh

Let's get started with Animation

Before starting you have to prepare the story board of your whole movie, story board is basically the drawing of every scene which is seen by the audience or what is visible in the camera.

This is the story board which i made for this short film and this is really a important step before starting with the animation, by doing this you got the clear idea of your film that, how it looks to the audience.

You can also edit your story board according to your requirements later also.

Then after this process, write everything on a paper that how many shots your movie consist of and make mastersheet of every shot, master sheet consist of all the action, which we can consider it as a base.

For the first cracker shot here is my master sheet

This is my mastersheet which define my whole action and by keeping it base i draw the successive drawings on papers separately.

Then after making all the drawings the final thing is to capture the pictures and make a movie out of that, remember that animation is all about time and spacing, the lesser the space the slower the animation is and if the distance between 2 frames(2 drawing) is more the speed is faster and by adjusting spacing between the frames you can define property of the object.

If the ball is heavy then it fall faster so you have to keep more space between 2 drawing and something like that you can give property to anything and it all comes by keep observing the stuff.

Now we are on final stage to make our movie so just open monkey jam software and adjust your camera to capture the drawings and make sure the camera remain undisturbed till you done with capturing.

So let's see how monkey jam works