A Short Animation

I've been monkeying around with Indeeo's iDraw application on the iPad and the Mac. The more I use it the more I like it.

For some reason I've never liked bitmap editing apps - like PhotoShop, Corel Painter or Autodesk Sketchbook Pro - as painting tools. I use them as image editing tools mostly. There are people out there who can work magic with them but I haven't put the hours in to become that good. I find it easier to use physical media - Pencils, brushes, paint and paper - but there's something about vector drawing that appeals to the tinkerer in me.

Some time ago I bought Boinx Software's Fotomagico. I played with it for a while but it slowly slipped into the background. I've been thinking for some time that it would be good for creating simple animations or animatics for storyboards. Then, the other night, I discovered that iDraw would export the layers in a drawing as separate files, all in one go - just click a menu item and voila! Presto Changeo!

The light went on. Fotomagico slide can have 6 layers that can be moved independently, so I can create a vector drawing in iDraw, export the layers as .png files then import them into Fotomagico to animate them.

I threw something together using some components from the Christmas Card and sat back with a delighted, ear to ear grin as I watched it play.

Picture this. Your driving down a road in the late evening, there are houses set back from the road with cosy glows in their windows, bare winter trees behind the houses. A bright crescent moon rises and a shooting star streaks across the sky.

Now watch this space...