Animation practice

Okay, I know this is weird since I am an illustration, but I was hoping maybe I would like to take animation too, just practice using it on Sai. However, I can't seem to figure it out how to get the animation on Sai since the help is pointless (it's in Japanese), so can someone teach how to work on animation?

Or do I need to go get Photoshop?

I use Adobe Flash so I cant help ya.

SAI is not an animation program, we just use it for drawing and coloring each frame. All the frames are then placed on Flash or other animation program that become an animation file type. Adobe Flash is the most common, but it's extremely expensive.

Figures. I remember way back that Adobe Flash is hell expensive, like 1,000 dollars.

I think I'll try and use my Windows Movie Maker, and try to shrink the image thin (and that's for WMM) for practice until I get the animation right.

A simple search for "free animation program" should yield some alternatives.

The next stable version of synfig is coming soon http://www.synfig.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4266 and it wil be a serious flash competitor. Its free and open source and under GPL just look at the stickman http://archive.org/details/SynfigCharacterTemplateTutorial

Uh, thanks guys. Maybe the one Guest has might work. I think I should know how animation work. And when I learn animation, you guys might be lucky to have another member for the animation team (but I just need to help with illustration first)