Flipbook HD is designed to simulate an actual drawing table where a 2D animator or artist will build the world in multiple layers and then move to the next cell where a new, but similar, scene will be drawn.
The tools available should be familiar to anyone who has tried out even the most basic art program. The app provides a brush tool that lets you adjust the size, softness and even pressure of the lines you draw as well as the standard assortment of eraser, shapes, text, eyedropper and selector (both lasso and square) tools. For your coloring pleasure, Flipbook HD gives you a color selector that lets you adjust the RGB values from 0 to 255 as well as an alpha channel percentage to adjust the transparency of the paint you are applying.
So, if you’ve handled even MS Paint, you should be able to throw together even a basic image to fool around in, but after that, things get a little more complex since you will want to make sure you break your work into multiple layers, or tracks as Flipbook HD calls it.
Let’s say you have a picture of someone throwing a ball on a grassy field. Well, while you will have to redraw the ball-throwing in the different animation cels, you don’t want to keep drawing that same background over and over again. So, you put that together on the bottom-most track. With a few more taps, you can make that static background span the entire movie.
As for the ball-thrower, the standard 2D animation technique has you moving from cel to cel and redrawing that character in a slightly different pose until the scene plays out. Much like the non-digital versions of this action, you can set up your drawing space so that the previous cel is shown through the current cel. This allows you to trace whichever lines didn’t move and know how much to change the ones that do. At this point, anyone familiar with how 2D animation happens should know what’s going on and see how Flipbook HD seems to do a good job of mimicking the real-world process.
In an attempt to make matters a little easier and cut down on the redrawing, Flipbook HD has the ability to add Keyframes. Again, if you are familiar with animation, this time in the computer animation side of things, you should know where this is going. The idea is that instead of drawing each cel of the character throwing the ball, you only draw the major points in the process, like the first scene where the arm is at the character's side, then one later where it is reared back, and then one where the ball actually leaves the thrower’s hand. With the magic of computers, the application is then supposed to fill in the blanks and get the arm smoothly between the different locations in the desired amount of time.
Unfortunately, I could never really get this feature to work. Despite multiple re-reads of the tutorial and plenty of time playing around on my own, I could only get the process working once … and quite frankly, I don’t know what I did then, I wasn’t able to reproduce it. So, does Flipbook HD do keyfame animation? Yes, can I tell you how? Not really. I did think it was odd that, instead of trying to morph one cel into the next over the desired amount of time, you are instead selecting the part of the image you want to move and rotating, resizing and moving it. As a result, the best I could do was something that looked like a Monty Python animation involving parts of the image on different tracks moving independently of the whole body and in ways that simply don’t look natural.
Okay, so, this app does quite a lot, and it has to in order to produce a somewhat complete 2D animation workstation. Unfortunately, it has a few issues that makes Flipbook HD a hard sell.
For one, you simply don’t have the control and fidelity you need in order to draw a nice, detailed picture. While you can change the brush to a thin line, you are still using your finger to do the drawing. Thinking that a good stylus would solve this problem, I finally got around to picking one up for my iPad, but I found I still had the same problems, it just isn’t exact enough to get the job done.
That’s okay though, Flipbook HD has the ability to import photos. So, instead of trying to draw the various items on the iPad, you can draw them separately and import them into the program. Except, I’m sorry to say that bringing an image into Flipbook HD almost always caused the app to crash, and that’s not the only time either. I found myself not being able to work in the app for more than five minutes at a time before some command I gave it caused me to have to relaunch Flipbook HD. Thankfully, the app seems to save frequently, so you won’t really be losing anything, well, except for time and patience, that is.
