animation notes

Notes for animation
DigiCel Flipbook lets you draw right on the computer with your mouse or tablet. Or you can draw on paper, like the pros, and shoot your rough drawings under a camera for speed and then scan your cleaned-up drawings for quality. Flipbook will keep track of all your drawings in its traditional exposure sheet with thumbnail images and play them back instantly with sound. Flipbook also provides specially designed tools to help you paint your drawings quickly and easily without having to learn or go through a lot of difficult steps. You can add pans, zooms, rotation, blurs and dissolves and then export movies that you can play on TV or post on the internet.
Once you've got the idea for the storyline you want need pictures to help you tell story. Traditionally these pictures were tacked up on a cork board and moved around until they were finally in the best sequence to tell the story. Flipbook lets you can scan, shoot or draw these pictures directly into the timeline and drag them up and down to change the sequence until the story unfolds just the way you want it to. Once the sequence is the way you want it, it's time to start working on the timing. If you tell the story too fast your viewers don't have time to get involved. If you tell it too slow they lose interest.
Flipbook lets you add the sound track lengthen or shorten any part of the story by simply dragging the storyboard panels up or down, individually or collectively. You can even pan across or zoom in on any of the storyboard panels to show how the scenes will look in the movie. Click below to see the animatic play.
Animators do rough drawings first and test them for movement before they do the final cleaned-up drawings. These drawings can be basic stick figures, simple shapes with volume or something that actually looks like the character. But right now it's more important to get the position right than to have a perfect drawing. And it's more important to get the images into the computer quickly than it is to get the best possible image quality. Shooting your roughs into Flipbook with a web cam or video camera is the fastest way to capture your roughs.

Flipbook has several features that make camera capture faster and easier. The images are captured directly in a traditional exposure sheet with thumbnails and you can make the paper transparent so you can see through lots of layers.

If you animate "straight ahead", doing each drawing in sequence, you can set Flipbook to automatically hold each drawing for one, two or three frames as needed. But when your animation has to fit in a certain time frame you'll probably do the key frames first. Since your key frames won't all be held for the same number of frames Flipbook lets you capture them and set their timing by pressing a number key on your keyboard. When the key frames are timed out and play correctly then you can go back and fill in the in-betweens or move on to the clean-ups.