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[ basic animation || transitions || effects || properties ]

Making a basic animation is very simple. In this tutorial I'll give you an image to work with that you will try to animate yourself while following the instructions I give you.

01. Copy this image and paste it as a new image in Animation Shop.

02. Now, make five frames of this in the same animation. The fastest way to do this is to press Shift+Ctril+L and it will paste the image into the next frame.
03. Once you have five frames, use the flood fill tool to fill in the stars with whatever colours you want to. Make sure that each frame is different. This is what my frames look like:

04. Once you have done that, you're finished! If you want to preview what it looks like, click the button that looks like this in the top menu.
05. Once you are ready to save, save your animation! You'll get a few windows when saving though. On the first one, name your animation. The next window is for optimizing. On the left side, there will be something that says: Quality Vs Size - I normally always have it set to the best quality. You only need to lower this if you want to reduce your file in size. Lowering this will also cause your image to lose quality though. The next window just loads all of your settings. The window after that will show you a preview of your new animation. The animation on the left is the original-non-optimized animation, and the one on the right is what your animation will look like when it's saved. The last window shows you the size of the file along with the download times.
06. This is what it should look like in the end:

Transistions are a cool way to have one frame transition into the other, such as fade, star wipe, etc. Because Animation Shop doesn't have too many really great ones, I'll show you the ones that are pretty decent.
01. First, copy and paste the image below into a new animation:

02. Now paste it once more into the same animation so you have 2 frames.
03. Colour each star a completely different colour in each frame. Try not to have two identical colours. This is what mine looks like:

04. Click back to the first frame and from the top menu select Effects > Insert Image Transition. A window will pop up with some options for you to use.
05. First, make sure that the option is set to start with Animation Frame. You can change the length and number of frames per second, but try to keep it low to make sure your file size does not become too large. I normally keep my length to 2 - 4 seconds, and frames per second to about 8 - 12.
06. From the dropdown menu, you can select from various transitions. These include: Blinds, Checker Wipe, Clock Wipe, Curtains, Dissolve, Double Split, Fade, Hue Wipe, Iris Wipe, Luminance Wipe, Morph, Mosaic, Page Turn, Pinwheel, Saturation Wipe, Slash Wipe, Slat Spin, Slats, Sliding Boxes, Spin, Split, Star Wipe, Twist, Wedge Wipe, Wipe and Zoom. Try them all out if you like; you'll be shown a preview of what it looks like before you apply it.
07. Below, I'll show you some of the transitions that work particularly well with this image. The first one uses Double Split, the second one uses Iris Wipe, the third one uses Pinwheel and the fourth one uses Star Wipe.

08. Once you've selected your transition and applied it, you can save your animation. However, if you want the animation to fade seamlessly, simply copy the last frame and paste it before the first frame, and add the same transition between the first two frames.

Effects are awesome. Although Animation Shop doesn't have very many, there are still some pretty cool effects to add to your images.
01. Copy and paste the image below into a new animation:

02. From the menu at the top, select Effects > Insert Image Effect. A window will pop up with some options for you to choose from. Like before, make sure the Animation Frame is selected, and that your Effect Length and Frames Per Second are not set too high.
03. Effects that you can choose from are: Compress, Explode, Fade To Grey, Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Noise, Pinch, Pixelate, Posterize, Rotate, Rotate Colours, Scratches, Shaky Cam, Shear, Spiral, Stained Glass, Stream, Stretch, Tv Scan Lines, Underwater and Wave. Feel free to try them all out, you'll be shown a preview before applying it to your image.
04. All you have to do is select the effect that you want, and then apply it. Below are some examples of some of the better effects. The first one uses Motion Blur, the second one uses Noise, the third one uses Posterize, the fourth one uses scratches and the fifth one uses Shaky Cam.

05. Once you have selected the effect you want, you can save your image. If you want more than one effect on your image, select all of the frames and from the top menu select Effects > Apply Image Effect. For the image below, I used Noise and Scratches.

01. There are two types of properties to your animation: Frame Properties and Animation Properties. You can get to these by click the Animation tab on the top menu.
02. Frame Properties will change the speed of you animation from 1 - 1000; 100 being equal to one second. You can manually set each individual frame to different lengths if you wish. Normally you will only change this setting if your animation is too fast, or too slow. If it is too fast, increas the number; if it is too slow, decrese the number.
03. Animation Properties control the looping of your animation. Normally you will always want your animation to loop, but if you wish it to only play once, then you can change the setting here before you save. The other property you can change is the canvas colour. Normally you won't need to do so.

Last Updated April 14th @ 3.29 am