A new digital hand drawn animation package!

This new digital hand drawn animation software looks cool and promising... It's called Animation Paper. If you sign up for their newsletter before the end of March you will be offered an early bird price when the software is finished! There's no pressure to buy but at least the discount will be yours if you want it. Here is a link to an article about the software on Cartoon Brew.

I hope the onion skinning feature is decent... That aspect of digital software is often very frustrating. The creator, Niels Krogh Mortensen wishes to create "the world's most responsive, intuitive and powerful software for doing one thing, and one thing only: hand drawn animation." That sounds awesome. It will be available for Windows, Mac OS X and iPad. A responsive program with great pen sensitivity and brushes would be fantastic to have.

Man, I miss drawing.

Video of Animation Paper in use:

Creating Hand Drawn Animation Entirely Digitally

I've been using Toonboom to animate scene 10 of my short film. I'm creating hand drawn animation for this scene, but doing it fully digitally. Having a set of top notch digital animation and drawing tools at my disposal is wonderful. I can do things that would be more of a hassle to do with pencil on paper. However I still find it a bit awkward sometimes. It's just... weird... sort of... for me to create drawings with a vector line and a tablet pen. It's hard to tell if this medium is helping me work faster or not. At the very least I don't have to scan drawings, sharpen pencils, punch paper and composite my work. On the other hand I don't get to do those things. I miss flipping actually. I feel like I had perfected my ability to control how much I see through my drawings on the light table and it was more comfortable than digital onion skin. I want to keep going though so I will push forwards.

My goals now are to get a bit faster, manage my time well, see progress happen on my film regularly and do honest work. I'll spend the last couple days of my holiday break on Pickled but from January 6 to April 13 I will be putting all my spare time towards an iAnimate course to further my practise of 3D animation. So my goal of seeing regular progress is not going to happen for awhile.

Here is a screen cap of the scene I'm currently working on: