Hey, I'm new to this site and this is my first post here. I have finished education for the year and have the next 3 months free, so was considering spending some of this time creating a short two minute animation featuring my two main characters, Josh and Angus. I have most of the knowledge on how I can create one but at the same time am unsure what software I should use - I own Adobe Animate and there are some free alternatives but I found most of them to either be to difficult to use or too limited in terms of features. There is also the Essentials version of ToonBoom Harmony which I could buy for £12 a month but I don't know if it's any better than Adobe Animate or not (I suspect the Essentials version is on a par).
I'm gonna try and get this animation to look as fluid as I possibly can with my current skill level, similar to the animation you got in western 2D feature films (which you no longer get much). There are plenty of online tutorials which I can use as a reference for how to achieve this and I intend to look at these as well as filming myself acting out certain movements to help me.
When I was 13 I made a handful of animated short films in Flash, but the animation was very limited and they feel like an absolute joke now which I'm embarrassed to have made. They're kind of like watching one of the poorest animated TV shows from the early 1960s but even more poorly drawn. Anyway, here's one below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csWtFD148jk
These were churned out in the space of less then a week each which was the main reason why they were so awful, but I've also greatly improved my style since then and currently my work looks like this (this is my character Josh):
I can't guarantee the voice acting will be particularly good, as I'm most likely going to have to voice both of them and I've been having a lot of wisdom tooth pain lately so that's kind of affecting my speech. Think though a deeper version of how it sounds on that 2013 video.
So yeah, I basically want some advice on if I should go ahead with this as a summer project and if so, what software you would suggest using. I got someone on a different forum suggest Blender, which apparrently has 2D animation support, but I would never consider using it as I find creating 3D animation difficult in it, yet alone 2D. In the mean time I'm probably gonna stick to using Adobe Animate unless somebody can name something better aside from the most expensive version of ToonBoom Harmony which is out of my price range.
