How To Animate on iphone
So you want to make an animation. What is the best way to make one of quality? A $1000 Wacom Tablet? A $2000 piece of software? How about a $.99 application on your iPhone or iPod touch? I’m not kidding.
Animation Creator ($.99) which also has a specified iPad app is a fantastic animation app that has all the things any professional 2D animation studio could need. The wide array of features includes varying frame rates, adjustable brush color and thickness and more.
This interface is simple to use, and if you have ever used an application from the adobe creative suite (i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash) you will feel right at home. Each frame of your animation is editable down to the pixel. Brushes can be from 1 to 48 pixels and have varying strokes for cool effects. There is a pencil, pen, and brush tool, along with a spray paint, and shape tool. This allows you to create pretty much anything. The colors are adjustable by wheel or slider, so once again, you can do pretty much anything. As for frame rates, you can choose anything from 1-30. You can import music for certain frames, or even create your own in-app. There’s a nice layering system for organization that is once again, similar to photoshop or flash.
Once you’re done, in the app you can upload to Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, your library, an email, or you can export the frames as photos. For a more professional production I would recommend that last option. You can even share the project between different iOS devices with the app.
The biggest problem I encountered with this app was aspect ratio. Since this app does not offer landscape mode, to animate with a normal video aspect ratio of 16:9 you would literally need to hold the application sideways and then flip it in editing. This is simply not feasible, so for now you are pretty much stuck with iPhone’s portrait mode in terms of your animation’s frame shape.
Other than that minor issue, this makes a fantastic animation app that I would highly recommend to someone looking to learn animation. If they fix that small aspect ratio issue, this app will definitely make my top 10 video production apps this year. Great job to the creators of this. Check it out now.
Overall Rating: (3/5)
