Tutorials Question?????

[Arti]

I have been working on a webpage to upload to the host site in which I plan to have tutorials that I write for various tags and graphics for those of you who wish to have them.

It will take me a bit to get it completed but it is in the working and hopefully won't be too long before I have everything ready.

My question is this. When I work up the animated tags and plan to write a tutorial for it, how do you prefer I do them. Would you want the animated ones to be instructions from scratch which tell you how to cut and move parts and begin building the layers for them or would you prefer to have the tutorials with the parts already cut, moved into place on layers and all you have to do in the instructions then is just open the image with all the layers already done and just duplicate and merge those as instructed? Those from scratch instructing how to cut out the parts, move them and cloning and build the layers for each will be a longer and more time consuming tutorial for you to work on than those that are already done for you.

The reason I'm asking you this is because I've been asked many times how I did an animation and when I tell them, a few come back and tell me that it takes too long to do all those steps and they don't want to spend much time on a tutorial.

Your suggestions as to which you prefer will help me know which way to work them up and write the instructions for them. I hope I've made some sense in my question .

[Marlene]

Yes, you've made a lot of sense, Arti. Before I answer, let me ask you something.
Is one way more advantageous than the other? What I'm trying to ask is would "us" doing the cutting, moving the parts and building the layers ourselves make us understand how to create our own animations better rather than having you do them for us? Or would we be able to learn how to do animations doing it either way? I don't mind the long tutorials at all if they help me learn better.

[Arti]

To be honest, you will learn more by doing all the cutting, moving and building the layers from scratch which in turn would help you learn how to create your own animations than you will from having everything already done for you.

I used to look at animated tutorials mostly from some MSN groups and they all have all the cuts, movements and everything already done for you in layers and all you have to mostly do is just duplicate the instructed layers and merge them. The only way you perhaps could learn from those would be if they include all the supplies they used to create the tag from their beginning of it and then you would have to take the tutorial and all the layers apart to see how it was done, but they don't always include all the supplies that they used to begin with.

The only way I learned from them was to take their tutorial apart and check where each cut was made and recheck each layer of parts they have you put together to see how it was put together to do the animation. However, when they haven't supplied everything they used from scratch, it sure makes it more difficult to learn how they do them.

In other words what I'm really saying is that by doing the tutorials in which everything is already done and built in layers for you is only learning how to put them together but not learning how they did all those parts to begin with.

I sometimes think they don't really want anyone to know how they are created from scratch.

[Tess]

Personally I think the one's where we have to do everything are better. Those that say it takes too long don't really want to learn the hard way. It's always better if you do it yourself. You an look at the end result and see if it looks right or wrong and figure out what you didnt do right.

[Marlene]

I agree, Tess. Those who want to do it the easy way are not truely wanting to learn how to animate themselves. I have always wanted to learn how to animate, and unless I have missed them, I have never seen tutorials on the internet where the writer taught the actual animating. You just may be hitting on something new here, Arti. I would much rather do it the long way if it's going to help me create my own animations!