I met Jonathan Houser, founder of Cinemek, when I was in Seattle for a meeting of the Northwest Audiovisualists (NWAV). He showed me the G35, an aftermarket 35mm lens adaptor for Digital Video cameras. Little did I know he would soon be releasing Hitchcock, the first Storyboarding app for the iPhone.

Hitchcock is an amazing application – you can take photos on-location, add stand-in actors, camera directions like zoom, pan and dolly, record notes or temp voice, write in descriptions, and more. Once done, you can view the result, with a timer running at the bottom – change shot timing, view again, swap shots, and then export as a PDF (video export is coming in an update).

I bought and installed the app and had some fun shooting locations around my house and putting together short animatics. This exploration got me wondering about how it could be useful from an animator’s perspective. Hitchcock’s focus is on Filmmakers – what would a similar application built for animators look like? I set off to discover what animation tools existed on the iPhone.

DIGGING INTO iPHONE ANIMATION UTILITIES

I found that there are mainly two types of Animation apps currently available for the iPhone – Character Animation apps, which tended to be very specific and limited in their scope, and Flipbook apps, which are mostly the same, with a few features setting similar apps apart.

Character Animation Apps

Puppet Animation allows you to add deformers to pictures and move, swing, scale and bounce distinct areas in realtime, or set loops. It’s something like a simplified version of the Puppet tool in After Effects. You can export an animated GIF when you’re all done, as seen above.

Stick It Action is all about making stick figures fight. It’s another interesting example of what could be done with skeleton rigs and purpose-driven animation – there’s an assortment of guns to fire, and tools set up to aim them, start and stop firing, etc.

Tappy Typing puts you in control of an interactive character. It’s not a utility, per se, but a set of animations for a character. It’s an example of an engine that could be a great tool in a larger program, with the addition of some skinning and keyframing abilities.

FlipBook Apps

By far, this was the most populated category of animation apps that I found in the App Store. Most of the applications look very similar, with only small feature differences. One particular application stood out from the pack in terms of its feature set:

Flickmation – I almost wrote it off due to a clunky-looking interface and lack of video examples on the website, but its feature set was intriguing. Besides painting and drawing, Flickmation offers fill tools, layers, onion skinning, stamps (reusable objects), copy/paste and a Java app to transfer files to and from the application. You can create PNG files on your computer, including an 8-bit alpha channel, and load them into Flickmation for animating. You can also export video to your local machine via the included Java application, as an AVI video or a PNG sequence.

After playing with it for an hour, it shows real promise as a start. The interface could benefit from a full facelift – it makes sense but it’s all over the place, visually, especially compared with the refined graphics of Hitchcock. I also found a pretty bad bug that repeatedly caused crashing when turning on onion skin options.

More flipbook apps for further investigation:

• Kineo
• Flip It
• FlipBook
• Animation Creator
• Cartoon Creator
• LED Animator
• Anime Maker
• RanRan Draw

CONCLUSION

It turns out that there’s really nothing like Hitchcock aimed more squarely at animators. Reading the Cinemek forums, I found that there are two animator-friendly features that will be included soon – additional angles for actor stand-ins, and importing external images. They may well add enough features to allow for real animation and editing, only time will tell.

Investigating all of these applications has at least given me a better idea of what would be useful for me in a Mobile Animation application:

• Reuseable Items – like Library items in Flash
• Keyframes – the ability to set start and stop points for the above items
• Onion Skinning – great for frame-by-frame animation
• Lip Sync – a couple of apps I saw had some interesting solutions for faking mouth movements based on audio
• Puppet Deformation/Animation – the ability to bring life to characters and sketches

If I’ve missed something that you would love to see in a mobile animation app, tell me about it in the comments.

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Canon GL1 on the left; Canon VIXIA HF100 on the right.

About a year ago, I finally sold the GL-1 I’d bought in film school and purchased my first-ever High-Definition Camera, the Canon HF100. “Finally”, I thought, “No more worrying about tapes or real-time digitizing – just a few 16GB Memory Cards and I’ll be golden.” Well, I was right about real-time digitizing being a thing of the past. It turns out that the flavor of AVCHD the HF100 uses is pretty useless in its native format. To be able to edit with the .MTS files it creates (or even view them decently), you need to transcode – which takes much longer than realtime, and gave me humongous files that ate up my external 500GB drive in no time. Additionally, you can’t shoot in SD – your only option is to shoot lower-bitrate HD files. Honestly, I mostly wound up playing the videos directly off the camera, through an A/D converter box, bringing it in as classic (downscaled) DV Video so I could work with it.

Additionally, working with the HF100 was a huge step back from my days with the GL-1. It was smaller and lighter, for sure – the HF100 easily slips into a cargo pocket for on-the-go and stealth shooting – but focusing with a four-way rocker switch just doesn’t cut it.

The DSLR Video Revolution

Reverie - Vincent Laforet

Like many, I was floored by Reverie – Vincent Laforet’s visually stunning short showing off the Canon 5D MKii. After a quick price check on the 5D MKii, I concluded that while the tech was amazing, I just couldn’t justify it as a Motion Graphics artist. I’d often run across beautiful videos shot with the 5D MKii, and simply sigh.

Finally, It’s Affordable

Canon T1i

Enter the Canon T1i. At $800 for Body + Kit Lens, it’s Canon’s first foray into offering DSLR Video at the consumer-level, and there’s a lot they got right. You can record in 720p or 480p (technically, you can do 1080p as well, but only at 20FPS, so I’m not counting it). You get manual focus and zoom rings, since they’re built into the lens, not the camera. On that note, you can use any Canon EF-mount lens, so once you outgrow the 18-55 kit lens, you can invest in a new lens and gain another level of shooting ability with the camera, without having to buy a new body (which is the norm in consumer-level video cameras).

After dealing with the HF100’s .MTS files, the movies that come off the SD Cards in the Canon T1i are a blessing. They are H.264-compressed .MOV files. On my MacBook Pro, that means I can preview and play them directly from the card, or from my drive after a quick drag-and-drop. No longer is it necessary to transcode for hours just to preview the clips on my machine and make my picks. The files load right into After Effects or Motion for quick sketching of ideas. When I edit narrative videos, I do transcode – but it makes such a difference to have the ability for instant playback and manipulation when that’s all I need.

These are stills pulled directly from the original movie file. The image on the left was shot with the kit lens, the one on the right was shot with the Canon 50mm f1.4, about a minute later.

The picture quality is also, I feel, quite a leap beyond the HF100 or your standard consumer camcorder. You’ve got real Depth of Field, and with the right lens you can get an amazing exposure range – shooting footage for my friend’s wedding in a shady grove in the evening was delightful with the help of a 50mm f1.4 lens.

For the full specs, check out DPReview’s in-depth testing of the camera.

The Downsides

The camera is by no means perfect. Some of the areas that could use improvement:

• There is no way to plug in an external Mic, so you’ll need a separate sound recorder if you want decent location sound.
• Autofocus is slow in video mode.
• Low-light prime lenses don’t have built-in Image Stabilization. It’s bad enough that you’ll want to stick to a tripod.
• Exposure controls are automatic in Movie mode. This was fixed on the 5D Mkii with a firmware update, but there’s no word of a similar update to the T1i, probably to keep this as more of a consumer model.
• Shooting time – the camera leaves the shutter open during movie recording, and the manual (and the camera) warns that leaving the camera in this state for too long could cause image degradation.

Conclusion

We’ve come a long, long way with consumer-level video. The T1i offers amazing video quality and latitude for its price. I don’t feel I could recommend it to indie filmmakers – they’d be better off renting a 5D Mkii (or RED or some other beautiful high-end camera), but for Motionographers who want to capture textures, close-ups, portraits and other short visuals, it’s an amazing tool to have in your arsenal.

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