To make a successful cartoon, you don’t need to be a master with the pencil; and you don’t need a Hollywood budget, either. What you do need is a good idea and a bit of spare time. Windows Vista comes equipped with everything you need to create a great-looking cartoon, so once you’ve got a good idea you can get started right away.
A cartoon consists of drawings – or frames, as they’re more commonly known – that are stitched together without gaps to create movement. So first, you need to draw all of the frames that will make up your animation. You can do this using Paint.
The best way to draw your frames is by using a pen tablet, such as the Wacom Bamboo (or if you’re lucky enough to own a Tablet PC, use this instead). Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with a mouse, which isn’t the easiest way to smoothly hand draw lines and shapes.
To get your cartoon going, draw about 5-10 images and save each one as a JPEG file. Just remember to name each of the files depending on what order you want them shown in the animation, otherwise putting them together will take a lot longer.
Depending on how artistic you want to get, creating a few frames will take you anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours, and the animation will last roughly a second. This gives you an idea of how many frames you’ll need to draw to create a reasonably long cartoon. A 20 minute cartoon on TV is around 120,000 frames, so patience is a must!
Getting it moving
Once you’ve drawn each of your frames, you can start making your animation in Windows Movie Maker as shown in our guide. Thankfully, this part takes a lot less time than the drawing bit, so once you’ve got all your frames ready, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to create your animation.
Now that you’ve dealt with the visual side, you may want to spice things up by adding some sound to your animation. The easiest way to do this is by choosing some songs you like and adding them to the Audio/Music timeline to emphasise parts of your cartoon.
Or, if you want to get a bit more involved, you can add sound effects and character voices. To do this, you’ll first need a microphone plugged into your PC. Then type Sound recorder into the Start menu search to locate and open the sound recording facility built into Windows Vista. From here you simply start recording sounds, then save the resulting file to your hard drive.
Create the movie
1. Importing. Open Windows Movie Maker and choose the pictures you want to add by clicking the Import Media button.
2. Choose Files. Press CRTL and A to select all the pictures (or press and hold the left mouse button and drag the mouse pointer over the frames), and drag the files into the Storyboard at the bottom of the window.
3. Smooth Talking. To make the animation look smooth, you’ll need to make the transitions between the frames shorter. Click on each frame on the timeline, select the right edge of the frame and drag it left. If you want to increase the time a frame lasts, drag it to the right.
4. Check It Out. When you’re confident that you’ve created something pretty good, you can preview your movie by using the movie viewer on the right-hand side of the screen.
5. Presenting. You can add an intro and an ending by clicking on Tools > Titles and Credits, and selecting whether you want to add a Title at the start, or Credits at the end.
6. Make It Pretty. Add some intro or ending text, and choose a font style and colour by clicking on the Change the text font and colour link. Once you’re happy with it, click on Add Title. You can preview your work at any time by using the movie viewer located at the side of the window.
7. Hit the Big Screen. Once you’re happy, you can save it in a number of different ways. Click on Publish Movie, and select where you want to publish it. Windows Movie Maker will then automatically convert your animation to the appropriate file type.
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