More Animation from Morgan

After our Stop Motion attempts with Lego, Morgan has been chomping at the bit to do some more animation. He could do it himself, but likes a bit of help from me so finding time isn’t always easy and setting up a decent storyboard and all the tools and toys needed to do it takes a while.

However, we had some time over the weekend, so rather than get the camera out and do some more Stop Motion animation I had a quick look on the App Store to see if there were any decent animation apps for the iPad. The first one I came across was called Animation Creator HD from Red Software. It looked good and there was a free version so I downloaded it and had a quick go myself. I have no animation experience and have never created an animation on the computer (other than a few animated gifs bak in the day when that was cool in the world of Web Design!), but within a couple of minutes and without reading any of the help files (I am a man afterall) I had created a short clip of a windsurfer jumping off a wave and doing a forward loop. It looked pretty good too.

So, with the app tested it was time to show Morgan and get started with teaching him how to make animations on the iPad. Morgan did one or two simple animations himself and then we realised that you couldn’t do anything with the animations once you’d created them. You needed the full version of the app for this. It only cost £1.49 though so I bought it so that we could do a little more. Along with a few extra features the paid for version allows you to upload your animations to YouTube and share them via Twitter etc.

The app is easy to use but has quite a few features too. These include layers, frame management, a scrub tool, full screen editing, and plenty of drawing tools such as a paint brush, pencil, spray can, eraser, line tool, rectangle, and much more. It even allows you to import images but we haven’t tired this out yet. On top of this, there is full audio support along with audio recording, and the ability to move, zoom and even rotate layers within each frame, all of which prove very useful for even the simplest of animations.

So, after a few tips from me and a quick practise Morgan came up with this following little animation.

Not bad for a first attempt by a 6 year old, and he now has plans for many more, although I think a few of them may be just a little too ambitious!

Tags: Animation