Decide what you want your animated film to be about, and what kind of a backdrop you want. Adding complex backgrounds or choosing to color your film will add quite a bit of time to the process. For your first animated film, it's best to keep things simple and to stick to easy-to-draw subjects.
Come up with a story and storyboard, drawing each important moment and deciding exactly how each figure will move when getting from one plot point to another. This will serve as the visual plan for your movie.
Acquire an animation table or light box. This consists of a glass center, lighted underneath, on which you can draw, along with pegs to hold your animation paper in place.
Draw up some animation tests using the table or light box and some scrap animation paper. Experiment specifically with how your subjects move. Creating animation that looks fresh and lifelike will require quite a lot of trial and error, and there are a number of basic animation principles to follow. For example, whenever a subject begins a movement, it is best to "slow in" to the motion, as this is how most things move in real life. Scholarly websites can help present the principles of animation in a way that's clear and easy to understand.
Draw out your film, frame by frame and according to your earlier storyboards. Use the light box and your previous frame to help you figure out exactly where to draw from one image to the next. Also, keep in mind that having 24 frames per second looks most natural to the human eye, so you'll need to draw 24 images for every second in your movie. You can also draw just 12 frames per second and hold each image for two frames to save time, though this looks a bit choppier.
Affix an animation peg tray to a table or wall so that it will not move. Then, secure your camera in front of your animation pages so that the lens of the camera is parallel to the pages of your animation. It is imperative that neither the camera nor the table move during this process, as even the smallest bumps can show up in the finished work.
Take a picture of each frame you have drawn and import each one into the computer. Then, using an editing program such as Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer, place each frame on the timeline and construct your story. You can also use a program made specifically for animation, such as Frame Thief, which is much cheaper and captures still images directly and puts them together into rough movies.
Show your film for a trusted friend before screening it to the public or submitting it to festivals to ensure that your film is effective.