Any tips for flying or jumping?

Hey techno.. There are many different ways of making a puppet fly or jump in your animation and I will write up the methods.

To support your puppet when it is flying/jumping you need a support to hold it up firmly while animating. This is called a rig. You can either use a tool like Climpex http://www.climpex.co.uk/newframe/climpex.htm which is noticable in animation, so you will have to edit it out in post production. The rig is too hard to hide.

Or you can use fishing wire or tungsten wire

 http://www.smallparts.com/products/descriptions/tw.cfm

http://www.americanfishingwire.com/

And hide it by painting the wire the same colour as your background or matting it with wax so no light will reflect off it,which will make it noticable.

To support the wire you would have to have it in a vice or clamp. The rig is secured into the puppet and it can then be held in the air.

I use PhotoShop Elements for this, but you can use MS Paint or The GIMP.

Masking.

First, Take a phot0 with the person held up in the air by the rig.

Next Take the whole flying subject out of the shot.

In Post Production, open up the image with no flying subject in your photo/frame editor, and then open the next frame with the subject and the rig on top of that frame.

Use The GIMP's, MS Paint's or what ever photo editor you use, and selct the Lasso Tool, and trace around the rig.

Hit the delete key, and the rigs all gone.

Hope this helped.

That's a good tutorial Riley. I haven't tried Photoshop Elements, is it more complicated then regular Photoshop?

No, not at all.

I got PhotoShop elements about four years ago, and thinking of upgrading.

And I should resisze those images above.