This article will show you how to animate. You will need:

1. Windows Movie Maker (Windows Only)
2. Paint (Comes with Windows)
3. A LOT OF PATIENCE!!!!!

 Now, since you are on a budget, this won’t be easy. But with time and quality, it can be accomplished. The reason I say this is because you will be doing this frame by frame. If you don’t feel like doing this, you will have to go and spend over $100 on some fancy animation software. Well , enough chit chat, time for me to show you the money free way.

Step 1: Making the Frames

 This is the hardest part of the animating. In this step, you will make the frames. Open Paint and make your first frame, then Click “File” “Save As”. I would recommend naming it something like the first letter of your title and then the number 1. And then you would do the same for the next one. Example: My title is Test. My first save would be “t1″ then it would be “t2″ then “t3″ and so forth.

 Now you need to move the items that are to be moved. As shown in the example above, i would just simply move th stick guy buy erasing and painting. However, don’t make huge movements. Make small movements like clay-mation. Every time you make the small movement, save it as another file as instructed above. I wouldn’t recommend trying to do anything EXTREMELY hard until you’ve become more experienced. I would recommend starting out simple. Although I won’t show it (mainly because I lost it), my first animation was a guy having an anvil dropped on him. I will today recreate that for you, the viewer. To do this, I will simply draw an anvil, move it, and save every time I move it.

Step 2: Putting it Together

 Now you must open Windows Movie Maker. Import the frames you made earlier. Also, it would be wise to change your Movie Maker to timeline. This can be done by clicking the “Storyboard” button in the bottom left area and changing it to “Timeline”. Now drag and drop the clips in order onto the timeline. Tip: You can select all the clips and drag them all at once by clicking on the first clip, holding shift, and then clicking on the last clip. Now drag it onto the timeline all at once. Once you have the frames on the timeline, we can add the part that makes the animations move to a good fluency. To do this, right click on the frame while it is in the timeline, select “Effects”, and then look for speed up double. It is recommended that you add the speed up double effect as many times as you can.

Do the same thing for all the frames. Once you are done, you should have a fully working animation as hown below:

Good Luck!