I often take my kids to the movies(animation) and asked them at the end, how was it? Instead of giving his reviews about the movie my elder one (7) often curiously asked me how this movie was made? To be frank I have no idea how to answer this question. All I know is that movie making and specially animated movies are extremely hard to make and it does require tons of computing power.<p>Can any one please point to a simple tutorial/site which explains the process of animation and how animated movies are made? I will go through it and will try to explain it to my son.
Not quite what you were looking for, but you might find it interesting to check out the Dreamworks animation blog. <a href="http://dreamworksanimation.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://dreamworksanimation.tumblr.com/</a><p>There are a bunch of steps, actually. If you're talking 3D animation, there's an ok blog post about it here:<p><a href="http://cg.tutsplus.com/articles/step-by-step-how-to-make-an-animated-movie/" rel="nofollow">http://cg.tutsplus.com/articles/step-by-step-how-to-make-an-...</a><p>hope that helps.
The best I can suggest (maybe others here can do better) is tell him to YouTube tutorials. There are ton of videos specifically on how animation software works and he can start there (similar to how phototshop tutorials or final cut tutorial works).<p>I'm not familiar with all the animated software used but Maya and 3DStudio comes to mind. For example: <a href="http://usa.autodesk.com/maya/" rel="nofollow">http://usa.autodesk.com/maya/</a>