Miyazaki wanna-be teen
January 22, 2015 6:00 AM   Subscribe

Easy animation software for the mac for a teen with an ambitious history project.

My son has a history project that he wants to do as an animation (cartoon). He has a little bit of java experience and can draw. His vision is that the cartoon will feature narration by a news reporter interspersed with scenes from the revolutionary war. The cartoon will be hand-drawn combined with images he finds. It will be cartoony, a little funny, and focused on the weapons & gear of the revolutionary war.

Anyway.

While he has done drawing in GIMP and has made a couple of stop motion lego movies, he has no animation experience.

Is there any free or inexpensive software that is available for the mac (and that does not have a horrifically long learning curve since the project is due in 2 weeks) that you would recommend?
posted by LittleMy to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I was going to recommend Manga Studio, but I think that due to the time crunch, he might be better off using something like PowToon.
posted by John Kennedy Toole Box at 6:19 AM on January 22, 2015


Best answer: I would suggest Hype. It's basically Flash, but for HTML 5. Nice set of transferable skills. Modern web. They also have a reflect app for the iPad and iPhone that allows you to preview your work in progress to see what it'll look like on mobile.

I think it's a wonderful app, and I think it's fairly inexpensive, but that's relative. If not the trail should let him get through his project.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:52 AM on January 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Do you have an android phone (or, I'm guessing iphone)? It might be easiest to do this in gif form with gif stitch or a similar app (photograph your drawings, set the time delay between them, done). Also don't know about gimp, but photoshop has an animation panel that does the same thing with layers (you can even change the time delays individually ie 1sec for 1 frame and 1/10 sec for the next 10, then 5 sec, etc)...this might be easier than learning a whole new program. (Converting from gif to mp4 or whatever he needs for final output is probably pretty trivial...ask google...I think there's even a website that does it)
posted by sexyrobot at 7:06 AM on January 22, 2015


Best answer: My daughter uses Toon Boom Studio.
posted by Ostara at 3:24 PM on January 22, 2015


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