animating a full cartoon solely in ae?

[femmedirector]

Does anyone have any ideas about animating characters?

I want to work with birds and maybe evolve to people.

Anyone have a great book or a site besides Creative Cow. I like their mouth moving tutorial but I am really looking to make the characters move aroung and interact with their environments more.

thanks for any insight!

[dory_breaux]

Its doable, but you would need photoshop I'd think.

[Matthew R. Rodwell]

If you are really interested in animation I would suggest downloading the trial version of Toon Boom

[Arson]

A local animation studio uses a combination of Photoshop, After Effects, Toon Boom and Flash.

[Gary Parkinson]

I do a lot of work in After Effects within our production company, we did some basic animations (cartoon character style) for a childrens DVD in AE, they looked ok but were very limited in what we could do.

We invested $200 in "Anime Studio Pro", The ability and control that you can have over your character with the bones and all the other specialised tools really make a difference in how you can animate and even create characters inside this program as opposed to AE. No need for any other program, I found it quite easy to create and draw what I needed all inside this software.
It took me about a day to work out this program, and for the price it was a great investment for us.
"Toon Boom" at the time was a little out of our budget for the amount of work that we do in this area.

AE is by far my favorite program, but for character animations you should consider
either "Anime Studio" or "Toon Boom"

Good luck.