My Favorite GIF App Features: Loop (iOS)

Universal Everything released Loop in 2013, with a hand-drawn UI and a great concept for straight-ahead animation (the more spontaneous style of animation, counter to pose-to-pose animation). The studio has since redesigned the UI in a minimal, almost retro, way, and have also released/updated other apps like Drawn Together and 1000 Hands, which have similar concepts. Loop is a mostly* free app.

*using the color green in Loop requires a $1 in-app purchase

My favorite feature when drawing with the app is that strokes vary thickness, from what I can tell, according to how fast you draw.

After completing 5-48 frames of drawings, you can export your animation as an animated GIF format onto your Camera Roll (which, unfortunately, as of this writing, can not be viewed natively in iOS’s Camera Roll), upload the GIF to UE’s collection of loops, or email it out.

It’s also worth noting that when you start a new frame (versus copying a frame) the app gives you an onion-skinned image of the frame before to help with registration.

The other thing that I really like about Loop is that it encourages the same curiosity and play that lured people like me into animation in the first place. There will always be something magical about the illusion of animation and film for me. And the fact that Loop gives anyone the ability to employ the persistence of vision with almost no onboarding or guidance is a remarkable accomplishment.