If you are a business owner, whether on the internet or with a brick and mortar building, then you know how important it is to capture the attention of potential customers. When dealing with the internet business, one way to do this is to make your website really stand out. Perhaps you can create animation banners with great graphics that will make people really notice your site and hopefully keep them coming back and generating sales.

Early animations started appearing around 1910 and were normally drawings that were photographed one at a time. It was a very intensive and long process, as there were literally hundreds of drawings for each minute of film. Of course, improvements were constantly being made with Walt Disney leading the pack.

He was the first to add sound to his cartoon animations and produced the first, full-length movie animations film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Then, with the introduction of computers, animation began to take on a whole new meaning.

For any type of graphic work, the quicker your computer processor is the better. Extra memory is also a huge help with computer animations and graphics. You may also want to consider a larger hard drive.

These types of files will build up quickly and the file size for a graphic or animated movie is much greater than that of a simple text file, for example. A computer generated vector image used to create animation can be 2D or 3D animations.

Of course, if you plan to work on a computer it is also advantageous to learn about photography, lighting and movement. You will need to visualize how the pictures animations, 2D animations or 3D animations will look and then have the know-how to make that inanimate object move.

There are many different software programs that offer both tutorials and downloadable programs. The tutorials are very important, yet each software program will likely have a different interface, different menus, palettes and toolbars etc.

Using a computer actually just gets rid of any excess tools that may have been needed to create animation. The basics needed for this include a computer with enough RAM or "random access memory," to run the software applications, whether it is for 2D or 3D animation work, and of course you will need to learn how to use that software.

Depending on which sort of animation you want to create, sometimes the process can be wholly computerized. In other cases, such as many 2D animations cartoons, hand penciling is still necessary.