gday this is my first post here and far from last just woundering when people do animation drawn animation that is, like walt disney or some thing like that, how do they animate the back ground? is it just one single frame that doesn't move? do they animate the people and just put it on there or some thing, sorry for my spelling i failed school but yer cheers for any help

These days technology wins out. If you have ever used such things as Photoshop or to a certain extent Cinema, you will fing something called 'layers'. Each layer can be rendered seperatly and then organised within the picture. For basic animations you can use its sister package 'Image Ready' or use any other such as Flash. Hope this helps

Walt Disney prouductions (and a few others) uses a first layer backround and place diffrent sheets of drawings upon it, as they animate. These animation sheets are fully transparent with the drawing (colored) on it. Those drawings are the animation.

Look at toonboom.com. They have several products. One is called Toon Boom Studio, and another is Toon Boom Digital Pro. The second one is the higher-end package, but both give you certain 3D abilities even though it's a 2D animation product. Like, you can use an image as a background, and have other images (vector rather than bitmap) on other planes in the foreground. Then you can pan or zoom or move your camera around and through these planes.

The higher-end product actually has a free Learning Edition that has some restrictions, like watermarks and a limitation on the size of your animation. But considering that it costs $3000 (TB Studio costs $400), I doubt that I'll ever have the full version.

As far as I can determine, Toon Boom offers the best products short of the really REALLY high-end products that big-time studios use and that can cost tens of thousands.