Flipbook Animation, iStyle.
August 8, 2008 by Ryan Ray
Believe it or not there are the “not-so-serious” iPhone users out there. They aren’t impressed with Google docs nor with Exchange support. In fact they probably don’t even know what those mean, they have little knowledge of Microsoft Word and think Powerpoint presentation are the bomb. You know they are just out to live a little and have fun. To hell with productivity and the next big thing, just give them something to enjoy. Even some of us “workaholics” like to kick back and have fun, so let’s talk about two little applications that will let us do just that.
These are two flipbook animation applications. If you don’t know what flipbook animation is then let me tell you. It’s usually done with some kind of notepad, preferrably with lots of pages still on it. You start out by drawing something, let’s say for instance a stick figure, on the first page. Your goal is to then animate him on each of the following pages to make him do something like a front flip. So start with your stick figure standing there on the first page, and from there draw him frame by frame jumping into the air. Continue to make him flip and then land and pose for you. It’s a simple idea really, and it’s how all cartoon animation is made in the world. Each frame equals one page, and you barely make changes from frame to frame. But what does this have to do with the iPhone? Well everything really. These are two environmentally friendly apps for making flipbook animations so let’s go over each of them.
Flipbook
The first app is simply called flipbook. It’s got a much darker interface compared to flickbook but seems to have a great set of tools. It has features such as an eraser, and you can take photos from your photo library or from the camera itself. You can then draw on top of those pictures. It has what they call “onion” skinning where the previous frame is very faint on top of the current frame you are drawing so you can see how to animate your next frame. It also has layered drawing. If you mess up big time there is an undo button or you can double tap to get a redo. Simply press play when you are ready to see your animation at full speed. There is also a website called flipbook.tv where you can upload you newly made animations. Check out the site for some strange animations. It reminds me of watching silent movies, but in color and on the web.
Flickbook
This app is much simpler than flipbook but doesn’t have any way to upload the animation you make. That is yet, the developer has said he is working on a way to upload the videos. That being said, It’s almost a deal breaker for me except this app is half the price of Flipbook. That’s definitely a plus for me when it comes to buying things. I like saving money so Flipbook is a good deal in my book, no pun intended. It offers about the same feature set, but one big plus is the unlimited undos. If some of you are as bad at drawing as I am this is a welcomed feature. I hate it when I can’t undo something I screwed up, haha. Flickbook has the same kind of “onion” skinning we talked about, and it has what it calls “painless shading.” I’m not so sure what they mean by this but they have a demo of Flipbook up on their website at Flickbookapp.com
Well what can I say for both apps? They are both fun and easy to create some animations with, Flipbook has more tools and can upload. Flickbook has very smooth playback and will have the ability to upload soon according to the developer. It’s also cheaper than Flipbook. It almost seems like this would be the one time to use a stylus on the iPhone. Especially whoever created the horse animation, bravo to them. So which app will be your animation app of choice? You tell me, leave a comment and let me know if this is something you are even remotely interest in. Thanks!
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Hi Ryan,
I’m the author of FlipBook. I appreciate your giving us a writeup, but I wanted to reply to your comment that Flickbook’s feature set is similar to FlipBook. Specifically, I wanted to explain why we charge $9.99–our users seem to agree the price is worth it, if you check out our AppStore reviews!
FlipBook lets you change brush size, has an eraser, lets you duplicate the previous frame (instead of drawing from scratch), has copy and paste, lets you zoom in, allows you to change your playback speed, lets you onion skin the next frame, offers redo, and more. In fact, two things you briefly touched on–layered drawing and being able to load images from a camera–are incredibly powerful! A number of users are creating stop-motion movies on flipbook.tv and finding out just how great layers are for animating (foreground and background, anyone). Plus, FlipBook provides you different options to get your movie off your phone (and we’re adding a third soon)–Flickbook has none. What’s the point of making a movie if you can’t share it with anyone?
The great bit is that if you take a look at our different writeups, the consensus is that FlipBook provides all of these more advanced tools while remaining incredibly easy to use.
It’s a powerful app, and I hope you’ll download it if you haven’t (drop me a line if you want a copy to do a more in-depth review) and play around a bit more!
Best,
Josh
Hey there Josh! First off I feel flattered that we have an official iPhone developer leaving a comment on the site. I love creating media and your app fits right in with that. I’m sorry if you were offended by me saying something about the price, I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway I’d love to give flipbook it’s own article, since my email isn’t on the site yet just send me an email at ryanr14@gmail.com so we can talk further if that sounds good to you. Thanks a lot for the comment!
Hope to talk to you soon.
[...] If you haven’t read the first article then please do go back a few weeks or so and read it HERE. After writing the article the developer of the Flipbook application contacted me and wanted to [...]