 Not really cared about animation but asked to do a workshop on doing animations using mobile devices I took time and dwelt into it and found some applications that was interesting and will talk about in one particular for today. The application I want to talk about is called Cartoonist. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.jecklandin.stickman&hl=en When looking into the different apps for the workshop it was at first dismissed as it does look like it is very basic and made for children. Yes it is set up so children or anyone can open it up and start to play with figures and animate them without any effort. But it can go much deeper than that. The big difference with other apps is that you can do a lot of things with this app that is not possible in any other animation application for Android and it is a lot of fun for people that do not draw too well for reasons that will be clear later. So it is the only application that use a skeleton system and that also uses something called tweening (yes this is written for people that have no experience in animation so if you have some experience please be patient as the concepts are already familiar to you)... Making it possible to set up a character once and just move the limbs or whatever is connected to the “skeleton” in comparison to draw each frame. So that works by drawing / painting different parts on small pieces that you can combine into “skeleton” system. So in the end it can become a pretty big construct and it seems to be able to take it pretty far. Did not hit any limit on how many parts that was possible to combine. Plus that you can make parts that have the function to stick to other parts for being able to more easily animate and then separate those parts while making the animation. Of course it is not as a impressive set of function for skeleton rigging as there is in full scale programs like for example Anime Studio or for the free Synfig Studio (impressive professional totally free software) and there is limitations but those can be liberating forcing out of the box thinking. So the other aspect that is not available in other apps (with the exception of some very simple apps where there is only pre-created figures to use) is what is called tweening which means that the app calculates all the intermediate steps when moving something into images. Instead of as in traditional animation where each image has to be drawn. In the video with the figure juggling two moons there are over a thousand images to get everything looking smooth. This would obviously been a pain in the ass to do by hand! In the video it is about thirty to forty images being manipulated by hand... And everything being rigged it is not a lot of work. The drawing tools are adequate and think that as long there is an eraser and the possibility to paint/draw with varying opacity it is enough to create interesting drawings. Another thing that can lead to a lot of creativity is that instead of drawing it is possible to import images and link them up in a skeleton or have them free floating as in the second video or cut up arms legs etc and build characters with. There are other animation apps that allow image import but nothing as easy to use as in this application. The limitation is that the rectangles that are used for drawing or the images are smaller and the background image is the only image that allows for the full screen but think that it is great in either case. Wrote the developer twice with some questions but he did not feel like answering which is a little bit sad as I would not mind to make a small series of animations based on personal creations and my main reason why I would not do it is because it seems that there is no easy way (could not figure out how…) to reach the characters that got made so if the device gets lost/broken the characters would be gone. The other things that I was wondering that I have not figured out are the export quality as there are no options and it could be nice to know. It does look good enough for YouTube or a computer screen in either case (do not have a TV to see how that would look like). Would also be good to know the image resolution for import of background which could be figured out with some testing but have been too lazy to do… There is a free version to try but it is a nice thing to have to make small videos to use as part of a music video for example and like mentioned before it is easy to do something even if you do not know how to draw as soon as something looks good it is fixed or just use photos creatively. It comes with a lot of premade figures and as such it can be fun for children to make short animations to. So will pop up here at Musical Android and write about other aspects of visual fun you can use your device for once in a while, as I got kind of hooked using apps as part of my art regimen. Think that it took some time and had some aversion with the drawing on a smaller screen but after being forced into it because of the workshop have come to the realization that it is not too hard especially with a pen even if it is not one of the fancy pens or a Samsung Note device. The pen I use is about a euro... Cosmo Koroly P.S - If someone knows how to reach the characters that gets made please share in the comments section and it will be added to the main post.  Sitting in hospital under observation but definitively have a better view today!
As the fever has diminished but the mysterious microbes that entered my skin have made one side of my face look like lobster-boy an interesting look that made my Sexy dermatology doctorette starting to flirt with me until she found out that the condition is not permanent. So now there is nothing else to do than write some random ramblings that in some way have to do with... wait for it... Android apps. The picture above and the picture of yesterdays hospital post are made with an app called Glitchr it is one of those apps that you may have tried that can emulate early day digital photographs and suchlike but it has some thing going for it that I have not seen in other similar apps. First of all it is free and without publicity! It used to contain some publicity but the developer did make such a silly amount of money on the publicity so he let it go free... Hooray for him! Also a hooray because it is actually nice and have some settings that the other apps do not have that I know about, one being (like the photograph above) an emulation of VHS tape. It can tweak the photographs just to something slightly disturbing which is of course something that this Lobster-boy likes. The other one being a 3D simulation. Like the photographs you see that are supposed to make photographs look 3D with the red / green glasses. I guess it works as it is supposed but I just like how it looks... So have been trying a lot of these apps out not because I think that it is especially exciting to use as photographs but to combine and rephotograph etc and one thing that interests me is using these type of emulated photographs for making stop motion videos. So yesterday sitting in one of those fabulous hospital beds that you can contort to any position started to take photographs with one of these apps of the blue hospital gown that they dressed me with and got a good interesting suggestion of sky.Which was good as I wanted to use sky and layer in pictures of painted / real skulls coming and going for a video but this also gave me the idea of playing with the interaction of fake / real sky. The problem have been with the stop motion apps of Android that first of all there is not many of them that are really good but the one I found that I like Clayframes do not have the possibility to import images. Making my point of using images manipulated by other apps not possible directly in Android. So yesterday night was looking again at all the animation apps and found a very interesting one that got installed and seems to actually be quite good it is called PicPac. It has the possibility to import images and choose many of them for import not only one by one which could rattle anybody's patience if you are going to do a stop motion clip of more than 20 seconds. Another thing that it had that I must say is great is that you can make a video of you moving things around slowly then let the app extract images at a time that you can specify and just use the photographs without hands visible. This way to do stop motion is so much faster than taking each image triggered by sound or movement or any other way that it will be exciting to play with the possibilities this offers. There is other interesting workflow options to that makes the application worth checking out the only thing that would make this superior to Clayframes (if you do not mind the difference in workflow) is that there is no overlay of the image taken before as you take a new image which is a standard feature in most stop motion apps. Both have free versions to try. Ahh there is many more things to write about and had a lot of experiences relating to music at this hospital but I guess that will be for another day... mjiauuu mjiauuuu until tomorrow...  Some time ago was posting about this animation being made and how the creator was looking for a composer using Android and he have now found one. (The music in the trailer is not the composer...) And now I am looking forward to see / hear the finished animation. The animation is made using only Android and me being a painter have tried some drawing applications that have left me feeling frustrated but after seeing a video of the animator doing drawings with just his fingers have made me realize that it is possible to do excellent work- as you can see in the trailer and in the re-posted video of him drawing plus one more of him creating... and on a small screen to boot! He is using an app called Flipaclip and Sketch Mobile. Got contacted by this animator and he seems to be a serious guy so it could be interesting to be involved in doing the music not only for his latest project but if things work out good why not for other projects? It is interesting as in his first animation and this one he is using only Android devices and Android applications and he has a blog where you can follow his exploits... http://animandroidproject.blogspot.com.es/ If you are interested in doing animations with your device there is some videos there that would be good to see as he goes through how he made the first animation and what applications and how he used them. Just one small detail... they are in Spanish but it can be worth seeing anyway even if you do not know the language to get the basic meaning of them and what apps he has been using... The music he is looking for in his own words: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First of all, the music must be made using android apps. I want to work with orchestral sounds, some kind of Scott Bradley music as in the Tom & Jerry animations. Specifically the special way that the sound fit the emotions in the actions of the movie, but working with loops too, because loops and repetitions are a very important part of the movies artistic concept. Of course, I'm open to suggestions. My email address is- josetonnymarquez@gmail.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To finish there is two videos one when he is using Sketch Book Mobile doing the matte paintings for the new animation and one where there is a short preview of the animation that is being worked on... Sometimes it is good to go old school and with the cameras being good on most devices nowadays you can make professional animation / stop motion videos with your device. Maybe the two problems to run into is to have an area undisturbed and with lights that would work good enough depending on what you want to do... So here is five animation classes from the sixties and lastly there is one video with Michel Gondry working on an animated movie about Noam Chomsky. As the first five videos are more technical and if you have no patience would recommend to at least see the Michel Gondry video as it is a more loose way to do it... I have used one application called Clayframes. Which I like a lot. It has so called onion skin to see an afterimage of the recent photo so you can adjust for the next photo... It also have three options for taking the image- touch, timelapse and best of all sound trigger so if you have set up your device and to be sure that it does not get moved you can fingersnap or handclap and it will take the image and device would never be touched... You can also just use your camera without any application and there is free video editors that you can use to import your images and make into an video... So yes this do not have too much with music making but in this day it seems to me that to get some more attention to your music it is good to make some kind of video and as animation is one way that you can use to make high quality videos it could be a good thing to look into... And with some imagination you can start to use all kinds of applications that can manipulate photos and make highly interesting and personal animations/videos. Playstore link: Clayframes Hey. Nice song that will put a smile on your face and even better, made with two different applications (except the vocals). Yes I am all for mixing the applications together, stretch the limits! It is also nice that the video is made with a Android application called StickDraw. Just looked it up and it looks like a nice and easy way to do animations and since the last update you can; import png / gif files plus create and reuse backgrounds. And best of all for free with ads and there is a version that for a small sum of money is ad-free. So this is a simple and nice way to do a video! Have a couple of times played around with an application called Clayframes. You could easily do something similar as in the video below. Being a animation program it of course takes the photographs directly in the device having residual overlay to see where the last image was before taking a new one and you can trigger it in time lapse fashion or by sound like handclaps and lastly like a normal shot to. You would need to synch up the music and the video the developer recommends a free program called VirtualDub- Think that one reason that it works good for animation is that it reads and places the images for the animation in order if the images comes labeled in a numerical way which it does in Clayframes. Otherwise if it does not need to synch up with something external you can record audio directly to the animation with the film running. One thing that I liked was to put the trigger at one second release hold the camera steady in front of your face for example, now keep your face still and move slowly around while the camera snaps the photos. Compile it into an animation and you have a glitchy background / still face moving weirdly through space... Anyway enjoy the video- Playstore link:
Clayframes |
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