I could probably research this...but instead I'll ask here.
How hard it is to produce hobbyist quality animation?. Let's say an animation that is hobbyist quality and five minutes long.
How good of a computer do you need and what kind of program?. What's possible realistically to move into this field for someone who only has hobbyist level equipment and no expensive professional stuff?. I almost am afraid to ask...maybe that's why I haven't done much research yet.
I talked with someone about animation and they told me the equipment to produce it was so expensive the only way they had access to it was to be near some large university.
I started to get rich person vibes and gave up on pursuing it. Now...well...it's nagging on me if you know what I mean. It's the highest form of art for me and I want to achieve it, if only on a hobbyists level.

adobe Flash...
travel over to newgrounds.com and you'll see the type of animation capabilities that general people make use of, although it is capable of so much more than that. Adobe, like photoshop, will likely have a 30 day trial for the program on their site, and I imagine the program would have a similar price tag... Design Suite Premium, which comes with Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and Photoshop (plus more I can't remember) only costs $600 AU over here for a student price, so I imagine the price in american would be significantly less, especally for the individual program if you already have other programs you use.

Another interesting thing that can be done, if you don't like the normal style of flash, is use Illustrator to create your images and then copy them over... newer CS versions are wonderful for inter-program compatibility.


All this is made under the assumption you mean 2D, and not 3D which would be significantly more expensive :o

it depends what kind of animation you want to make.
3D animation- Blender and years of learning it. 3D might be too difficult if you have never had a class in it.
2D- Flash is a good program to have. It's great for small animations and easy to use. however, flash animation always gives of a "flash" look, which isn't especially good. If you can get a light table and a hold of a program called toon boom, then you would be able to do traditional animation. Traditional animation is great when starting to animate, since you learn all of the animation principles. Ii suggest the book "The Animation Survival Guide" by Richard Williams. He worked under the 9 old men, (Olli Johnston, Milt Kahl etc) and in that book is all of their animation techniques. Even if you just want to do it as a hobby, it's a great feeling to really be good at what you do, traditional animation can help you with that.

I do have a light table. Thanks, I might check that out.

I personally research some of this stuff up on occasions. I also want to become an animator someday, but it is a process that takes much time, patience, and skill. You have to do a lot of prior steps such as storyboarding. But since you're asking for hobbyist, then yeh check out the programs mentioned to you. I have toon boom studio on my comp. It's pretty high quality, but my scanner sux (it takes too long to scan a single image) so I dont often use the program. I want to someday become a pro at animation, but atm i'm only novice at best. I also have a animated movie that has an extra where it shows you how it was made, so i go by that too. Wish ya luck

it all depends

It really depends on what kind of animation you're interested in. I don't know anything about 3D animation yet, so I can't comment on that.

2D animation can actually be done quite easily. I took a course of animation where we did some hand-drawn stuff. This kind actually doesn't require much at all. We just used regular computer paper, hole-punched it and threw it in a pronged folder and drew away. We could use the light tables if we wanted to, but I never did. When we were finished I scanned them all and imported them into Flash. Instant video.

They were rather simple things though. Link and Link but it just goes to show that you don't need fancy equipment to animate something.

Of course, if you want to do something a bit more complicated, it would probably be best to work with a program. Flash is handy for animating a lot of things happening at once. Just assigning something to repeat an action is so much faster than redrawing it a thousand times.

Is that yours?...I like it.

Yea, those were my class projects. :3

Thanks.

I think you should definitely try out hand-drawn animation. It's not to difficult, and as long as you keep it simple it doesn't take too long and you can get come practice in.