Attached Link: Lucy talks about Donald.

Hi

It really all depends on the animation and how much experience you have at it.

When I started it took me a long time to do 10 seconds of simple animation.

Now I can do 4,500 frames of animation in 6 to 8 hours if it's a character walking to the camera then standing still talking while moving about in a natural manner.

I don't render my animations, it just takes too long, and if you are going to use them online you can't upload anything really high resolution anyway.

Instead I work and export them bigger then I'm going to use them and the look good when shown the size they are going to ge used.

I usually create my environment by using a background image or video with a few props in the foreground to add depth, then with lighting effects and sound added it looks pretty good.

It's possible to make the character look like it's walking in the picture and not look like it's a background image at all.

Let me make clear that I'm no expert at this, I've only been working with the animation thing for about 6 months but it is possible to do fairly complxe animations in a fairly short time once you figure out how it works.

It's also possible to spend hours, and hours trying to get a fairly small thing like hair movement to look the way you want it to.  I've gone buggy trying to do that.

So how long it takes really depends on you, and how fussy you are.

There's a sample at the top of the page, I spent about a week working on and off doing this one, maybe 20 to 25 hours. I've gotten better at the walking and lip syncing since I did this one but this shows the things I've described.

Remember I don't claim to be a pro, but I am having a lot of fun doing this.  

I always wanted to make movies and if you stick with it it's possible to be your own writer, director, producer and production designer. LOL

With Poser and Adobe Premiere Elements you can do almost anything you can think of once you get the hang of it.

As to your original question: At my current level of skill I could do a video of Lucy in an environment raising he hand looking at it and then looking at the camera and winking in about 15 to 30 minutes and as one of the other posters said, you have to move every part of the body to make it look natural.  People just don't stand still.

Give it a go, I guarentee you'll have fun doing it.

Good luck!

Mike

If you shoot a mime, do you need a silencer?