Help with building an animation

[DrunkenBeard]

Hi,

Well I guess I should start by saying that I have never made a video before and that I am expected to have one ready for Wednesday. The video is supposed to be a presentation for a team-project I'm working on so it won't include any real footage, it's more an animation with text, pictures and a voice doing the presentation, think of something like this, only we're not selling a product but an idea.

I'm wondering what software I should be using to achieve this, something with maybe some templates and where you can easily animate objetcs would be awesome. I have already made the objects I'll be needing and wrote the rough structure of the video so I only need something to animate it.

Thanks :)

PS : I have no constraints on the software price if it does the job as we're fully sponsored.

[DocM]

Will the imagery be computer generated or will you be doing stop-frame animation (positioning/shooting/assembling stills of figures)?

The first requires that you all use the same animation software so you can share meshes, textures etc.

Stop-frame can be done using digital still cameras, and assembling the stills (aka: an image sequence) can be assembled in most editors as long as you all agree on a standard frame size.

I find image sequences very useful for doing animation because you can load them into Photoshop for detailed touchups etc. Just make sure you have a huge drive and use a format that has an alpha channel (for overlays,)

On the cheap software end, Corels VideoStudio editor has a propriatory filetype (*.uis) for dealing with image sequences. Just stick serially numbered images in a folder, define the number range for each sequence and VS writes a named file that when loaded causes the editor to treat each sequence of images as a single video file.