DESKTOP, WEB & MOBILE APPS – Frame by Frame & Cartoon Animation

CATEGORIES: RESOURCES: Animations & Comics, RESOURCES: Apps for Creating New Media Projects

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ABOUT ANIMATION: To learn more about different forms of animation, see this guide: Different Approaches to Animation

For more animation apps, see: DESKTOP & MOBILE APPS – Stop Motion Animation

DESKTOP APPS

  • Pencil (Mac and Windows; free): “Pencil is an animation/drawing program that lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is intended to be a simple program enabling anyone to make 2D animation. Pencil is free and open source.”
  • TVPaint Animation (drawing based animation Mac and Windows; cost)
  • Animation Desk for Mac (cost $9)

Additional Info

WEB APPS

GoAnimate.com

GoAnimate.com is a free web tool that lets you make short cartoon-style animations. You write the script and then choose from a collection of characters, sets, voices, and so on.

TIP: Choose a British accent for your character and it won’t sound quite so robot-like.

TO SHARE: Provide a link to the web version, export to YouTube (where you can download and edit further), or record with a screencast app.

EXAMPLES: Browse the tag archive for GoAnimate

More Web Apps to Check Out

  • Scratch: “With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community. Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.” (Free)
  • ABCYA.com (oriented towards kids, but provides good intro to frame by frame animation)
  • FlipbookCreator.com

Also Google terms like: free animation creator, free animation tools, free flipbook tools

MOBILE APPS

Here’s one of the winners of Animation Desk’s 2013 Animation Contest:

ABOUT ANIMATION: To learn more about different forms of animation, see this guide: Different Approaches to Animation

DESKTOP APPS

Animated Stories

  • CrazyTalk Animator 2 (Mac & Windows)
  • Anime Studio (Mac & Windows) (review)
  • ToonBoom’s free trials (Mac & Windows)
  • Plotagon (Mac, Windows, iPad) invites you to enter your script or screenplay and then bring it to life with characters, actions, and backgrounds. Unlike most of the other options, which are 2D cartoon style, this one produces a kind of low-resolution 3D style animation.
  • Synfig Studio is a “free and open-source 2D animation software for creating film-quality animation using vector and bitmap artwork. Use vector-based elements and animation-keyframes to produce smooth high-quality 2D animation, without working frame-by-frame.”

Animating with Slide Presentation Apps

The three main slide presentation apps, Keynote (Mac iPad or desktop), PowerPoint (Mac and Windows), and Google Slides (web) all have the ability to animate text and objects using a simple keyframe approach.

The resources below are on animating with PowerPoint, but you can find resources on the other apps via Google searches.

WEB APPS

Wideo.co

From the Wideo.co home page: “Wideo is the perfect online video tool, that allows you to easily make animation videos for your product demo, presentations, teaching lessons, or just to have some fun. It has never been so intuitive to create an online video. With Wideo anyone can make cool videos.”

wideo-website

Check out how easy it is to use keyframe animation using this app:


 

MOBILE APPS

DESKTOP APPS FOR 3D ANIMATION

Free apps for 3D animation:

  • Plotagon (Mac, Windows, iPad) invites you to enter your script or screenplay and then bring it to life with characters, actions, and backgrounds. Unlike most of the other options, which are 2D cartoon style, this one produces a kind of low-resolution 3D style animation.
  • DAZ Studio (Mac & Windows): much higher quality 3D, though the free version comes with only a limited set of characters and locations.
  • CreaToon “allows you to do cut-out-shape animation without having to set every single frame. Just set certain keyframes and the computer will do the in-betweens. Thanks to the real-time preview and the keyframe editor, you can easily fine-tune your animation until you are satisfied with the result.”
  • Anim8or “is a 3D computer animation program that is designed to allow straightforward creation of animations. This is a good introductory program to 3D animating. Once you have created a model or scene, you can render high quality .jpg and .bmp images and .avi movies and save them to disk for later use.”
  • Blender. Blender is a free open source 3D content creation suite. The platform provides a wide toolset from modeling to sequence editing, allowing the creation of complex animations. While this platform is beyond the needs of product sites, the 3D component can be used to design sets for 2D animation. Price: Free.

More Apps

 

ANIMATED GIFS

You can find many more through your own web searches.