How to Make Your Own Animated Movie

If you have ever wanted to make your own animated movies but not known how to get started, try out some free, online software that will let you assemble, enjoy and even distribute your soon-to-be classics digitally. You will have a great time, and you might even surprise yourself and your friends with your creativity.

Everyone loves to direct. Even those of us who are shy and may not enjoy the spotlight still like telling people where to go and what to do every once in a while. If you are honest with yourself, can you truly say that you have never been to a movie or watched a television show and said to yourself, "I would have done that differently, " or, perhaps more likely, "I could have done that better." And it is entirely possible that you were entirely right. Unfortunately, production is a big budget pastime. Producing even the lowest budget television shows or movies usually costs tens of thousands of dollars. As a result, most of us simply consign our dreams of directing to the closets of our castles in the sky and go on with our daily lives.

If watching cartoons makes you want to tear your hair out, now is the time to make a change with your own animated movies.

Now, however, you can direct any time and any place that you have an internet connection - and you can do it for free. By creating your own unique and imaginative animated movies, you can live out your dreams of producing and directing at least on the small screen of your own and friends' computers. There are several types of computer programs that will help you create animated movies. There are many pieces of software that you can buy, but before you get involved in investing in your animation empire, try it out for free at http://www.dfilm.com/live/moviemaker.html. This website belongs to a company called DVolver Movie Maker, and it will enable you to set the scene, create dialogue, work with multiple characters and scenes and even insert your own dialogue into animated movies that you design yourself.

Before you begin working on your movie, make sure that you are in a location with a secure and speedy internet connection. This type of project requires a good internet connection or you will find it incredibly frustrating as your characters will not move smoothly and you will not be able to enjoy the action in your movie. If you do not have a good internet connection at home, do as much preparatory work as possible and then go to a location like a library that will have a stronger connection.

Lay out a story line before you start working on your movie. DVolver Movie Maker gives you several different scenarios to choose from, and you can include multiple scenes. You can use a chase scene (two people running, one after the other), a soliloquy (one person speaking), a rendezvous (two people meeting) or a pick-up, in which one person encounters another and then both leave together. Make some notes on how you want your movie to proceed so that you will know what scenario to choose as well as having some ideas about location and the characters that you would like to use. Stay general since you will be working with settings and drawings that have already been created rather than being customized to your specifications.

Once you know what you want to make your animated movie about, it is time to start production. Go to the DVolver website (link above) and follow the prompts to set the scene for your movie. You will select a scene first, and then a background. You can choose from a variety of settings such as a swanky log cabin retreat, a romantic beach, the city, the deck of a cruise ship or the snow-capped mountains. Next, you will need a background. This will be the action that happens in the sky behind your real movie action. You can use realistic backgrounds like clouds, night stars or the sunset, or you can use fantasy backgrounds like beating hearts, bubbles or flying saucers.

The next animated hit could start with you.

Next, you will pick your plot. Use the one that best fits the scenes that you made notes on earlier. Your choices will be between rendezvous, pick-up, chase and soliloquy. You can only use one plot per scene, but you can have multiple scenes in the same movie. So if necessary, you can spread your action out to make your animated characters' actions seem more realistic. Once you have a plot, then pick your characters. They can be male, female or even alien. Some characters are very sultry, some are extremely simply drawn and others look like they popped right out of a children's animated story. Use the characters that work best with your story, but be aware that some of the characters are not suitable for children's viewing. You will need to pick a character for each person in your plot, so the most people you will have in one scene is two.

Now that you have characters, give them a voice. Fill in dialogue. You can have your characters talk to each other in a series of three exchanges. Make it fairly concise, though, since you only have 100 text characters per character for each exchange. The dialogue will be inserted into your movie as the action plays. Once you have finished your dialogue, select background music. There are a wide variety of options here, including silence. You can repeat the processes described to add more scenes at this point. When you are done, click "Finish Movie." This will prompt you to give your movie a title and put yourself in the opening credits. You can choose from several credit styles, including "Classic, "Horror, " "Radioactive" and "Seventies." Now, you are ready to play your movie!
Once you have completed your movie, you will probably want to watch it several times and make adjustments. You might want to change the background, the music or even the characters depending on how the finished product looks to you. Once you are happy with your production, you can email it to yourself and to your friends. Then, everyone can enjoy watching the results of your directorial debut as an animated movie artist and producer. This incredibly fun, free way to make animated movies will be a great entertainment for you and your friends and is an ideal creative outlet for anyone.