Checkout the cartooning and animation books in my booklist section, where I have started to talk about the books that I find useful.

I have started a new area of the site, dedicated to cartooning, this will have some mini tutorials on drawing with Flash.

The above scene is from the cutout animation tutorial

The above animation was created with a program called Toon Boom Studio. It has a lot of great features in it and it can export Shockwave files.

It has clearly been developed with the traditional animator in mind, as it successfully mimics many traditional animation tools.

One of the major advantages of this program is that it has a virtual camera, this makes it very easy to pan and zoom around your animation (notice that the camera rotates and zooms out in the above movie), this is a lot harder to achieve with Macromedia Flash.

The other great thing with ToonBoom is that you can actually place and move elements of your scene or the camera in 3D space. Actually in the above scene the camera is moving backwards rather than zooming.

To create the above animation, I followed one of the tutorials that came with the program. The tutorials are well written and easy to follow.

The version that I used was version 1. Version 2 is a marked improvement over the first version. ToonBoom Studio 4 has just been released.

There is also Toon Boom Studio Express, which is a lower priced version with a cut down feature set, but it may be all that you need if you just want to create small animations for web pages.

If you would like to read more these, or even try them out, you can get more information and download trial versions from toonboom.com