Animation : Starting animation by Nguyen Chau

Absolutely, undoubtedly Adobe After Effects. Get Adobe After Effects CC 2015. It's a monthly payment and this revision still has some bugs but AE is the industry standard in doing 2d animation. Once you have the subscription for CC2015, btw, you will be allowed to download the CS6 and CC2014 'legacy' versions from Adobe, which are more stable. As far as learning, I started with Adobe Classroom in a Book for After Effects back in the stone age, but these days there is the miracle of youtube. A search for 'After Effects beginner tutorial' or something like that will bring you a lot of amazing and fascinating videos of people making animation come to life in a way you can follow, pause, play, and understand. Classroom in a Book might still be a good option to make sure you have the bases covered, but maybe not even. Once you've gotten to the point where you can move a line of text across the screen, fade it in and out, and maybe do a couple of horizontal blurs for practice, get a real-life project to work on where you have to achieve a specific look or animation result. This is preferably for a paying client, even if it's just titles for a wedding video for your friend or whatever. Do what you have to in order to figure it out and make that person(s) happy. You will learn a lot in the process. Good luck!

Thank you, Mr. Fabre! This was very informative! I possess very little drawing skills. In your opinion, do I have to have drawing skills to be able to animate?

Animation covers a wide variety of skills from doing text animation for, say, a movie trailer, to doing special fx such as explosions and composites, to animating drawings and characters like in South Park, for example. It's quite easy to take existing drawings of characters, provided they are formatted correctly, and animate them. Adobe has an adjunct to After Effects called Character Animator which really makes it a lot easier to do that kind of, well, character animation. Of course, not knowing how to draw might be a bit of a hindrance if that's what you want to do, specifically, but maybe you can team up with someone who does draw well and do the animation while learning to draw yourself. Once you start to learn After Effects, you will recognize how it is used in a majority of media we see today and find your niche. Btw, I've been a 2d/3d animator, including doing character animation, for over a decade, and am not a skilled drawer, for what that's worth. :)

May I contact you on Stage32's chat or through email? I am working on a project currently and I wanted to ask for your professional opinion, how feasible my project is? Thank you!

Actually there is no industry standard for 2D animation. Flash, After Effects, Harmony and TV Paint are some programs used at a variety of American studios such as Disney, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. They all have strengths and weaknesses depending on what you are trying to do and your skill level. Flash is easier than the rest, but has more limitations. TV Paint requires drawing skills. After Effects and Harmony are very similar, but Harmony is superior in character animation protocols where as After Effects is more versatile in adding other elements to you project.

Thank you, Mr. Harper! I appreciate it!

Blender! :D

Thanks for commenting! I've tried Blender and I have to say, it is an amazing piece of software! But the learning curve is rather steep! I'll keep on working at it!