This is a short animation done be Canaan M. Audio done be Phanin S.
It's a simple animation about life and how we can build up everything, but in the end it can't come with us. This is only to be thought provoking - it would take ages to draw in more characters and kids...Blah, Blah, Blah....
Hope you enjoy...And are not too depressed...Remember thought provoking ;)

If you are interested in getting some animation done for your group or church, we might be able to help you, please feel free to msg me.

Many people ask me how this animation was done - i hope this helps...

Adobe Flash does this thing called "tweening" (you start with the beginning and end poses, and the software completes the in-between poses, or 'tween'). An example would be you draw a man with his hands up, and then after 20 frames you draw him hands down. Flash will process all the positions in-between. But, there is still a certain amount of frames needed to be done by hand, especially if the character changes angles (a face turning left to right, toon turning from front to back, etc.) Tweening works best on a XY plane, if that makes sense? You can do a pseudo Z plane or depth thing, like 2.5D instead of '3D'. (I must be confusing the heck out of you by now).

An alternative is a 'puppet' method, where you break a character into parts, and animate the parts separately. For example, separate hands and legs at the joint, and you animate by rotating the limbs/joints. But that is probably more robotic looking if you are just starting out.

Of course, the best animations are still done by hand, frame-by-frame as nothing else is as expressive. The masters spend hours and years to hone their craft, that's why they are so good (classic Disney stuff). The simplest method, is probably using a low frame rate and do a stop-motion thing with character cutouts from paper and then re-arranging them on screen at about 8 frames per second over the timeline.

There's heaps of resources online you can check out, one good one is Computer Arts magazine's website: http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials. Search for "Animation Tutorial", you might find what you need there. Tons of Flash tutorials.

If you want to learn more about traditional animation and want a good, solid source, the Animator's Survival Kit is excellent. Even current day pros use this 30 year old material to learn their craft: http://www.theanimatorssurvivalkit.com

In regards to software, the mains ones to use are:
Adobe Flash: http://www.adobe.com/au/products/flash.html
Adobe After Effects: http://www.adobe.com/au/products/aftereffects.html
Toon Boom Studio: http://beta.toonboom.com/home-users/toon-boom-studio