Anyone Use Flipbook?

[magicmarker]

Hey everyone!

I'm new here, from Australia. I'm pretty new to animation, though I've been drawing (esp. cartoons) all my life. And I'm pretty good at it (I draw in a Mort Drucker sort of style.)

I'm currently in the last year of high school, and I'm going to do a 6-8 minute film. I'm going to make mine an animation. Just plain A4 paper and Flipbook Lite.

It's going to be black and white, except perhaps the background. I still don't get how to make the foreground characters solid white, and the rest transparent (so the background can show through). Any pointers?

(This isn't going to be pro animation. I've done a very short animated sequence with A4 paper before, edited it on Final Cut Pro and it plays back well on the TV.)

[myshkin]

Hello,

If you are talking about Digicel Flipbook, i use the Lite version too.

When you scan in drawing, all the white space is seen as transparent. I guess all you have to do is use the fill tool in colour mode to put whit paint into your figure.

A little trick i found for getting more layers out of Flipbook Lite, is too scan one layer as the background, and one layer as the foreground, then export the image as a still. You can then import that still as the foreground layer leaving you with a new background layer.

[magicmarker]

Thanks for your advice! I've got my characters in solid colour now (using autofill), but I'm having a little difficulty with the background... Do I import an extra long bg and check the "Scale to fit" option??

[captain crap]

hi
go Australia
what state are u in?

[myshkin]

I have never used a background yet, so i could not really tell you. But, if you go to the website, digicelinc.com, then go to "down loads" then go to "more down loads" you can get a free video tutorial.

Also, the guy answers emails very quickly, and seems to have a lot of patients.

[magicmarker]

Thanks. I'll be looking it that

And Captain crap - I'm from NSW.

- oh crap I just realised I posted this in the Art Gallery thread...

[syellin]

Hey guys,

I've been using flipbook for most of my personal projects for a while, and also use it with my students (so easy to pick up this software!).

You must check the scale to fit option, so that even though you're scanning into the BG level, it will adjust it to match your other levels (otherwise you have to worry about the pixel dimensions, and most people don't want to bother with that - I know I don't)

Stu

[magicmarker]

Yeah I do.. but it seems to squish the whole BG into one frame. So when I pan the BG, the entire length of the BG moves across, and I'm left with a white space. What do I do?

[syellin]

THat's probably due to the 'scale to fit' option. I forget the actual pixel dimensions (Kent over at DIgicel had told me in an email a long time ago, but I don't recall), but I know that was how I was able to keep the BG at its actual size while I resized and moved the character layers on their individual pegs.

Stu