DP Animation Maker

Here's a fun little program that does a few cute tricks and is fun for kids or adults to play around with and may even come in handy to save you some time on a quick effect for a project. I can't see anyone using it a lot but what little it does, it does pretty well and the price is reasonable at just under $27 for the registered version (evaluation copy free to download). DP Animation maker is a smart little program you can use to create animation gifs for websites, backgrounds and other projects with very little effort. Within minutes you will find yourself tooling around the effects toolbar trying out all the plugin effects to create weather, lighting and object animations within your static picture. It also allows for the import of your own static images into any picture and works good with transparent background images like .pngs or .gifs. Sure, anyone with a few mid to high-end progs could recreate the effect, but for those weekenders who want to create some jazzy little images to email their friend or stick or their webpage, DP Animation Maker takes the pain out of construction. If you want to create your own animated wallpaper or screensaver they also offer cheap programs specifically for making those as well. I would download the free trial and play around with it before purchasing but still feel it's a bargain for the fully registered version.

Toon Boom Storyboard Pro....What's an Animatic?

interface of Toon Boom Storyboard Pro

I suppose the first question I should address before going on about animatics is, what is an animatic? Think of an animatic as a multimedia storyboard, a series of images placed together to relay a story or idea enhanced with movement, sound and/or footnotes. Before devoting the time and effort to create an animated story, commercial or media presentation, the smart approach is to plan it out. You can waste a lot of time and effort creating a fully finished piece only to have to ripped apart by editors, producers and clients, then it's back to square one on your project. By conveying the flow of your project through still image usage, you save time and give everyone an idea where you're headed, artistically. Often this can be a stumbling block as well-a lot of individuals out there aren't visionaries and may find it difficult or down-right impossible to perceive your story through still images. So there you are left trying to describe some 'cool move to the left while the first guy jumps in the sir, then the second guy sees him and starts-'...the glazed eyes of those listening tell you the point isn't quite driving home. So what's the happy medium point between finished animation and sketches, workload, effort, project perception? The answer is, the animatic.
The animatic helps bridge the gap of understanding movement and storyline flow of a project and to date I have found that one of the best pieces of software out there to create animatics is Toon Boom Storyboard Pro, created by the sane company that gave us Toon Boom Studio. TBSP is a scaled down version of Toon Boom Studio but gives you just enough tools to make fantastic presentations that you can distribute as a document (PDF) to be printed in a professional looking format (just like the big studios....nice) or in an electronic format to be viewed as a Quicktime movie, which adds the effects of sound and/or motion. The interface is quite easy to learn and use and will have you creating presentations in no time. Tools include tablet/mouse sensitive pen, eraser, color palette-most the basic tools you'll find in any basic paint program, but added is the movement ability to rotate, scale and move elements within your project and time/sync them in accordance to your story flow. Side notes can be added for additional help in understanding your piece, onion skinning capabilities to help you with animation and layers to provide you ease of project element organization. Toon Boom offers a limited time trial offer of their software which is always nice to try before you buy and if you feel you need a good followup program for finished, full animation presentations, Toon Boom Studio is an excellent choice-check both of these programs out at their website.