2D Animation Course for Teachers and Beginners, Step by Step

Welcome to the cartoon making course for children and teenagers. You and/or your child will learn the basics of animation. In this course, you will go from having no former knowledge to having the major concepts of cartoon making and knowing how to create your own short animated films. This course gives you the skills to turn your imagination into reality.

Too much historical information can adversely affect children's enthusiasm. In the video, I talked about the general history of animation. Now, I will share information for people who are curious about the history.

The first examples of animation are Thaumatrope, Zoetrope, and Praxinoscope, which emerged in the 1800s. Each one of these technologies stepped ahead of its predecessor, enabling the emergence of today's cinema technology, which were simple mechanisms that used drawings and illustrations.

The mechanism called Thaumatrope consisted of pictures drawn on 2 paper discs of the same size. When these pictures were rotated at a certain speed, the two pictures would overlap, creating a new picture. Today, paper toys prepared with the same logic are produced by teachers in kindergartens to entertain children.

Zoetrope and its higher version, Praxinoscope, consists of 8-24 frames illustrations drawn around a disc. These drawings are part of certain familiar movements such as a dancing ballerina and a running horse. The drawings are fixed on a rotating disk, when this disk is rotated rapidly the drawings appear animated. While watching the image formed by looking at the viewer through the tiny window on the disc in Zoetrope, the rotating mirror mechanism placed in the Praxinoscope allows many people to watch the moving reflection in the mirror at the same time. This idea of ​​mirroring was later used as reflecting technology in the internal mechanisms of film cameras and projectors.

You can examine the images of all mechanisms by searching them on the internet.

I produce several Thaumatropes with children in my classroom lessons. It entertains, surprises, and makes them wonder. You can watch the example of my works in the video above, which you can easily do with your child at home or with your students at school.

I suggest you do similar drawings, just like I did in the video above, before starting to work on the software. It will be very useful to understand and convey the subject. As a result, Thaumatrope is the ancestor of technology in all of the movies we watch today.