I Am Making An Animation App

For years I have meant to learn how to do hand drawn animation. There’s this cycle where I watch videos on YouTube about it, get excited, download an animation app on my iPad, attempt to make an animation, get frustrated with the app, and give up. Over and over. The one time I didn’t give up so quickly was when I decided to use Procreate to animate, which is funny because Procreate has zero animation features. To animate, I treated layers as frames and went through a whole tedious process to replicate onion skins, and then exported each layer individually.

When all my frames were finally exported, I’d send them to my computer to run them through an online gif maker. Of course, I couldn’t even see the animation until the whole thing was over and turned into a gif, which made it a very anxiety-inducing process.

I feel like it says a lot that I had a better time doing all that rather than just use one of the plentiful animation apps on the app store. I thought a lot about why that was the case, and came up with some answers.

My first ever animation in Procreate.

1. The pencil brush on other apps just couldn’t compare to Procreate’s. It seems like a lot of the animation apps on the app store were coded before the Apple Pencil came out, and so now even though they technically support it, it doesn’t feel natural at all. Sometimes it’s due to the brush not being accurate and making random lines where I don’t want them; sometimes it’s due to having bad pressure curves and my hand cramping trying to make dark enough lines. Whatever it is, I just can’t enjoy drawing frame after frame if I don’t enjoy the pencil brush that I am using.
2. The designs of other apps didn’t make sense and/or were overly complicated. Now, I know what you are thinking. Zoe, get over yourself. You can either get used to the design of these apps or customize the complicated ones to be less complicated and just show the features you need. Well, both of those things are true. And a lot of people do just that—they push through the things they don’t like about the apps and go on to become amazing animators. I have the utmost respect for those animators who get past the steep learning curves of the apps they use. But… the learning curve doesn’t have to be that steep. Animation is hard enough to learn on its own, so why not make an app that makes the process as enjoyable as possible? I believe Procreate revolutionized a lot of things about the illustration process by thinking through every single detail so that when you when you open the app it feels like it’s just you and the canvas: the most inspiring environment to draw in. Why can’t we have an app that does the same thing for the animation process?

Wow, Rough Animator has left about a quarter of the screen available for your drawing area :O

There is one story that really stands out to me when it comes to the danger of badly designed/complicated apps. For a while my brother was super into making pixel art. He got a nice program on his computer and began doing pixel art animations. One time he made an animation that was so cool, I asked him to show me how he did it. He opened the app that he’d used and walked me through his workflow. When he was done, I said:

“Wait, so this app doesn’t have onion skins?”

“Onion skins?” he asked. He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. All this time, he had simply tried to remember where all the pixels in his last image were. When I told him what onion skinning was, his mind was blown. Turns out, the app he was using actually did have the onion skin feature; he was just too new to animation to even know to look for it, and the app had so many other features that any kind of exploration was a daunting task.

Clip Studio Paint. One of the better apps for animating, IMHO, but it’s not even technically made FOR animating. It just happens to have animation tools, along with tons of other tools that I don’t use while I am animating.

Plus, the more time you spend exploring the app, the less time you spend actually animating. A lot of people have this concept of the more features an app has, the better it is. But honestly, extra features can just be distractions. This can be especially problematic for beginner animators. When beginners see all the tools that are available, they are tempted to use as many of those tools as possible in their workflow. But when making animations, everything extra that you do takes a tremendous amount of time because you have to do it to EVERY frame. Even just adding the most basic colors to your animation takes forever, which makes it a huge waste of time for new animators because it’s a tedious task that takes away from all the time that you should be spending practicing core animation concepts.

So, what is the solution? Well, I am super excited to tell you the surprise that I already gave away in the title: I am making the animation app of my dreams. It will be super simple, but every single detail will be perfect and seamless, from the most natural feeling pencil tool, to an interface that melts into the background and lets you focus on what is important. I am currently in my last semester of my gap year, and I am planning to get a good start on the app before I go to college so that I have a base to continue to work on while I am at school. I will be blogging the whole process, sharing my designs and programming updates. I look forward to everybody’s feedback, especially since I know a lot of you are way better artists and/or programmers than I am.

Yes, this is going to be extremely hard, especially since it will be my first ever full app. But I am determined to try my best and see where that leads me. I hope you guys will enjoy reading about all of my successes and failures along the way.