Mobile Animation Tools for the iPhone

Posted October 15th, 2009 / By Surya Buchwald in Hardware, Resources, Software

HITCHCOCK

I met Jonathan Houser, founder of Cinemek, when I was in Seattle for a meeting of the Northwest Audiovisualists (NWAV). He showed me the G35, an aftermarket 35mm lens adaptor for Digital Video cameras. Little did I know he would soon be releasing Hitchcock, the first Storyboarding app for the iPhone.

Hitchcock is an amazing application – you can take photos on-location, add stand-in actors, camera directions like zoom, pan and dolly, record notes or temp voice, write in descriptions, and more. Once done, you can view the result, with a timer running at the bottom – change shot timing, view again, swap shots, and then export as a PDF (video export is coming in an update).

I bought and installed the app and had some fun shooting locations around my house and putting together short animatics. This exploration got me wondering about how it could be useful from an animator’s perspective. Hitchcock’s focus is on Filmmakers – what would a similar application built for animators look like? I set off to discover what animation tools existed on the iPhone.

DIGGING INTO iPHONE ANIMATION UTILITIES

I found that there are mainly two types of Animation apps currently available for the iPhone – Character Animation apps, which tended to be very specific and limited in their scope, and Flipbook apps, which are mostly the same, with a few features setting similar apps apart.

Character Animation Apps

Puppet Animation allows you to add deformers to pictures and move, swing, scale and bounce distinct areas in realtime, or set loops. It’s something like a simplified version of the Puppet tool in After Effects. You can export an animated GIF when you’re all done, as seen above.

Stick It Action is all about making stick figures fight. It’s another interesting example of what could be done with skeleton rigs and purpose-driven animation – there’s an assortment of guns to fire, and tools set up to aim them, start and stop firing, etc.

Tappy Typing puts you in control of an interactive character. It’s not a utility, per se, but a set of animations for a character. It’s an example of an engine that could be a great tool in a larger program, with the addition of some skinning and keyframing abilities.

FlipBook Apps

By far, this was the most populated category of animation apps that I found in the App Store. Most of the applications look very similar, with only small feature differences. One particular application stood out from the pack in terms of its feature set:

Flickmation – I almost wrote it off due to a clunky-looking interface and lack of video examples on the website, but its feature set was intriguing. Besides painting and drawing, Flickmation offers fill tools, layers, onion skinning, stamps (reusable objects), copy/paste and a Java app to transfer files to and from the application. You can create PNG files on your computer, including an 8-bit alpha channel, and load them into Flickmation for animating. You can also export video to your local machine via the included Java application, as an AVI video or a PNG sequence.

After playing with it for an hour, it shows real promise as a start. The interface could benefit from a full facelift – it makes sense but it’s all over the place, visually, especially compared with the refined graphics of Hitchcock. I also found a pretty bad bug that repeatedly caused crashing when turning on onion skin options.

More flipbook apps for further investigation:

• Kineo
• Flip It
• FlipBook
• Animation Creator
• Cartoon Creator
• LED Animator
• Anime Maker
• RanRan Draw

CONCLUSION

It turns out that there’s really nothing like Hitchcock aimed more squarely at animators. Reading the Cinemek forums, I found that there are two animator-friendly features that will be included soon – additional angles for actor stand-ins, and importing external images. They may well add enough features to allow for real animation and editing, only time will tell.

Investigating all of these applications has at least given me a better idea of what would be useful for me in a Mobile Animation application:

• Reuseable Items – like Library items in Flash
• Keyframes – the ability to set start and stop points for the above items
• Onion Skinning – great for frame-by-frame animation
• Lip Sync – a couple of apps I saw had some interesting solutions for faking mouth movements based on audio
• Puppet Deformation/Animation – the ability to bring life to characters and sketches

If I’ve missed something that you would love to see in a mobile animation app, tell me about it in the comments.

Surya Buchwald aka Momo the Monster is a Designer/Developer of Motion Graphics and Interactive Media. His specialty is building fun, hands-on systems for live Visual Performance. He runs MMMLabs from his home in Portland, Oregon. You can also follow Surya on .