I don't come from an arts background but want to apply.  I think it's a long shot but I gotta try.

Hey all, I'm extremely new to animation.  I get the theory of all the drawing/physical aspects of animation but I don't know how to piece all the individual elements together like my character/action and backgrounds.  So I have some pretty basic questions that I can't overcome.  Any help would be much appreciated.

My first issue is: I have scanned drawings of a character that I can make into it's own movie, but how do I put that character over a background.  I don't want all the blank space of the page, just the character.  So far I've been putting the drawings into photoshop individually, using the selection tool to select the figure, putting a pixel mask over that layer, and saving it as a TIFF (preserving transparency).  Is there an easier way to do this?  I don't think I can just put the whole scanned image over a background because then my character would also become transparent.

Second question: For compositing I have been importing only one of the hundreds of TIFFs saved, and magically they all import as a movie to After Effects (don't know how, because when I import "multiple files" every image appears on screen).  Any suggestions or better ways to do this?

Finally (for now): Is there an efficient way to paint a whole stack of drawings in photoshop at the same time (or other software) or am I expecting software to do something it can't?  Do I just need to paint each drawing separately?

thanks for your help, tim