what worries me is the fact that there isn't really anything about animation out there other than that warner bros drawing thing from some guy that was an artist in the 60s
Anything?
There are plenty of good books on the subject, and I've learnt about the basic elements from observation, experimentation, and reading on the 'net.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animation#2D_animationlists a few important topics (onionskinning, tweening, morphing) and provides some other stuff (eg a link to a video for animation techniques)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyframeI plan to buy this DVD eventually; there are some clips excerpted from it available on the website:
http://www.theanimatorssurvivalkit.com/I'd also advise you to get Deluxe Paint IIe (downloadable somewhere or other; DOS), ProMotion (trial/commercial ($25?); Windows) or Grafx2 (Free; Windows/Linux/DOS/Amiga), and play around with the function that lets you pick up parts of the sprite and use them as brushes... this makes moving objects / parts of objects dead easy so it helped me understand animation better.
Playing around with the animation features in Blender also helped me to understand keyframes.
So a breadth of experience is very important to acquire.
As to methods, I can describe how I animate:
(I use GIMP-GAP, which is a rather comprehensive animation/video editing add on for GIMP.)
I think out a few keyframes and draw them as stick figures.
I step through the animation and see if I'm missing keyframes, in which case I add the additional frames.
Using onionskinning is very important for this.
After keyframes are planned, I turn them into color-'coded' silhouettes using a 3x3 brush, anatomy knowledge and experience
and clean up important edges with a 1pixel brush (important edges are those in the 'front edge' of the movement of a particular part, ie. the edge that is least far from the destination created by the animation).
Onionskinning is even more important here to be sure that the volume of the parts are consistent.
At this point I usually clean up one frame completely to act as a proportion/volume reference for the others.
I make sure that any secondary features (eg flowing scarf) are also cleanly and consistently animated here.
Now I finish cleanup so that every edge is clean.
I do the tweening; I look at the paths the different parts are taking in the keyframes and try to interpolate smoothly between them so that each part moves along a coherent curve or line. I avoid tweening very fast moving parts,
as they should typically snap between keyframes, or have just 1 or two tweened frames biased a lot towards either the end or start of the motion... so some duplication of a part from a previous frame happens here.
As to where to add tween frames.. it's just about getting an acceptably smooth representation of the motions so that relatively slow movements look smooth and fast ones look snappy.
Note that when you're tweening, it's even more important to consider each individual joint and its range of motion in the animation in order to get the most expressive result. So anatomy understanding is terrifically important here even if your character is super cartoony.
btw, have you read what Tsugumo has to say about animation?
http://mirror.motherhamster.org/tsugumo/default.htmlIf not, why not?)
After tweening, the actual rendering starts. There's not much to say here except you need to develop solid lighting skills and the ability to concentrate on a style and apply it just as equally to every part of every frame.
I try to render the whole animation at once, rather than individual frames, in order to increase consistency and
spot problems sooner. (eg. adding each level of shading one by one to the animation, rather than one by one to the individual frame)
Copious amounts of copy+paste or brush picking tend to happen here
what else: I save frequently, and run the animation again every time I make a significant step forward in the creation
of the animation.