Ready to become a great animator?
Well you’ve found one of the best resources online for it! All the courses below are included in our subscription, and some of our most popular courses can be purchased separately.
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Course Title: Tradigital Animation – Head Movements
Instructor:Â Conan Sinclair
Runtime: 4 Hours
Software Taught: Adobe Animate or Adobe Flash
Course Units: 8
Recommended path 1:Â Choosing the right animation courses largely depends on what you eventually want to do as an animator. With a CartoonSmart subscription you get access to every course, but you’ll obviously want to invest your time in the right place. If you have access to Adobe Animate (Adobe Flash is fine too) or any illustration software with a timeline, we recommend our “Tradigital” series if you want to really focus on character animation. We’ll cover body mechanics, timing, lip syncing, setting up a fight scene, animating 2D effects, and character rigging (the rigging course does require Adobe Animate or Flash).
This training path will give you more of a traditional sense of animation, almost as if you were using pencil on paper. You won’t rely much at all on the animation tools of Adobe Animate (like inverse kinematics), as you’ll be taking a very hand-drawn approach, so a Wacom tablet and pen would be recommend. Â Or if you have an iPad or other tablet to draw with, you could easily sketch there and import those into Animate.
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Course Title: Tradigital Animation – Body Mechanics
Instructor:Â Conan Sinclair
Runtime: 6 Hours
Software Taught: Adobe Animate or Adobe Flash
Course Units: 11
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Course Title: Tradigital Animation – Fight Scenes!
Instructor:Â Conan Sinclair
Runtime: 9 Hours
Software Taught: Adobe Animate or Adobe Flash
Course Units: 13
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Course Title: Tradigital Animation – 2D FX!
Instructor:Â Conan Sinclair
Runtime: 6 Hours
Software Taught: Adobe Animate or Adobe Flash
Course Units: 16
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Course Title: 2D Character Rigging
Instructor:Â Conan Sinclair
Runtime: 6 Hours
Software Taught: Adobe Animate or Adobe Flash
Course Units: 28
Recommended path 2:Â If you have Toon Boom Harmony or Toon Boom Animate*, we recommend this animation series. This path teaches most of the same animation principals: lip syncing, body mechanics, proper timing, fight scenes, as well as 4 leg walk cycles, but this series makes heavy use of the tools of the Toon Boom products. So while there’s still plenty of fundamentals to enjoy in this series, we’d be hard-pressed to recommend it without using a Toon Boom product.Â
*Animate was later merged into Harmony
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Course Title: Animation in Twelve >BLANK< Lessons
Instructor:Â Rick Pickens
Runtime: 13 Hours
Software Taught: Toon Boom Harmony Premium  (which is now a combination of Toon Boom Animate and the original Harmony), Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, SketchBook Pro and Garage Band
Course Units: 17
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Course Title: Character Design & Rigging
Instructor:Â Justin Cook
Runtime: 4 Hours
Software Taught: Toon Boom Animate (now Toon Boom Harmony)
Course Units: 16
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Course Title: Character Design & Rigging
Instructor:Â Justin Cook
Runtime: 85 Minutes
Software Taught: Toon Boom Animate (which is now Toon Boom Harmony)
Course Units: 3
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Course Title: Walk and Run Cycles Tutorial
Instructor:Â Justin Cook
Runtime: 90 Minutes
Software Taught: Toon Boom Animate (which is now Toon Boom Harmony)
Course Units: 4
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Course Title: Four Leg Walk Cycles
Instructor:Â Justin Cook
Runtime: 1 Hour
Software Taught: Toon Boom Animate (which is now Toon Boom Harmony)
Course Units: 2
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Course Title: Animation Exercises
Instructor:Â Justin Cook
Runtime: 4 Hours
Software Taught: Toon Boom Animate (which is now Toon Boom Harmony)
Course Units: 5
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Course Title: Stick Men Animations
Instructor:Â Justin Cook
Runtime: 4 Hours
Software Taught: Toon Boom Animate (which is now Toon Boom Harmony)
Course Units: 8
Two great courses for every animator:  Looking to win that Oscar for Best Animated Short? Or maybe just Best end of semester animation. Get some advice from professional storyboard artists, as well as scriptwriting tips for that epic screenplay trying to get out of your brain.Â
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Course Title: Professional Storyboarding and Animatics
Instructor:Â Christopher Wade
Runtime: 4 Hours
Software Taught: Adobe Animate (or Flash) and Adobe Premiere (or any non-linear video editing software)
Course Units: 4
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Course Title: Storytelling Basics and Scriptwriting with Celtx
Instructor:Â Christopher Wade
Runtime: 1 Hour
Software Taught: Celtx
Course Units: 2
Subscriber Exclusives
What else do we have? We understand that not everyone is looking to spend weeks or months honing their animation skills. Maybe you just want to animate some characters or FX for an app or video game. For that we’d recommend either Adobe Animate or Spriter, and we’ve got plenty of shorter format courses (anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour) to kick start your animated project. Plus you can find many more Adobe Animate courses in our Illustration section.Â
Free Courses
Get our 9-part Adobe Animate Basics course, plus plenty more goodies when you sign up for a Free User Account.
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