Ryan Maloney says stop planning and make a five-second animation with whatever tool you have. Post it publicly, tag it, and repeat. You'll find your strengths, build community feedback, and attract collaborators faster than you'd learn from tutorials alone.
Chapters
The best advice I can give to get started in animation is to just create your first animation. Just aim for 5 seconds. It's going to be garbage. Just get it done, post it, and put it out there. Use any program you can get your hands on. FlipaClip, Adobe Character Animator, Adobe After Effects, paper and pencil with an iPhone camera. The tools really don't matter. Just get that 5 seconds of animation done. Highly recommend creating in public, tagging all your work, and repeating that over and over. Don't be afraid to embarrass yourself. Talk about your process, share what you are learning, because there's other people behind you that are coming up that want to learn what you are currently learning, and people will respect that and follow you, and you'll get more attention for it. As you're creating in public, pay attention to the skills that are developing, what you like to do, what you don't like to do, what other people are telling you you're good at, what people are asking you to do for them. Start connecting with people in the animation community. Help out on projects. Develop your skills, but also build good relationships so you're always top of mind to those people.
