DigiCel FlipBook
DigiCel FlipBook lets you draw right on the computer with your mouse or tablet. Or you can draw on paper, like the pros, and shoot your rough drawings under a camera for speed and then scan your cleaned-up drawings for quality. FlipBook will keep track of all your drawings in its traditional exposure sheet with thumbnail images and play them back instantly with sound. FlipBook also provides specially designed tools to help you paint your drawings quickly and easily without having to learn or go through a lot of difficult steps. You can add pans, zooms, rotation, blurs and dissolves and then export movies that you can play on TV or post on the internet.
Features:
Storyboards - Get Your Story Straight
Once you've got the idea for the storyline you want need pictures to help you tell story. Traditionally these pictures were tacked up on a cork board and moved around until they were finally in the best sequence to tell the story. FlipBook lets you can scan, shoot or draw these pictures directly into the timeline and drag them up and down to change the sequence until the story unfolds just the way you want it to
Animatics - That's My Story and I'm Sticking To It
Once the sequence is the way you want it, it's time to start working on the timing. If you tell the story too fast your viewers don't have time to get involved. If you tell it too slow they lose interest.
FlipBook lets you add the sound track lengthen or shorten any part of the story by simply dragging the storyboard panels up or down, individually or collectively. You can even pan across or zoom in on any of the storyboard panels to show how the scenes will look in the movie.
Lip Sync - Read My Lips
No matter what kind of animation you do sooner or later you're going to have to break down the dialog into syllables and figure out the correct position of the lips and tongue to so the images will match the sound. FlipBook makes this easy. Some animators like to write the alphabet letters into the frames where they belong so they'll know which mouth drawing to use in each frame. Others use a standard set of mouth drawings and position them in the xsheet so they can see the lips move in sync with the dialog as the scene plays. Either way, FlipBook makes it easy.Start by scrubbing through the scene to find the first word you want to breakdown. Then use the cursor keys to step back and forth through the frames and syllables. As you determine which sound goes into which frame you can either write the letter in the image window so that it shows up in the xsheet like you see to the left or just highlight a square in the xsheet and press an alphabet key on your keyboard to insert one of FlipBook's standard mouth drawings into that frame like you see on the right. You can also drag any mouth drawing up or down to fine tune the timing while the scene is playing by holding down the Alt Key while you drag the thumbnail.
Rough Animation - Diamonds in the Rough
Animators do rough drawings first and test them for movement before they do the final cleaned-up drawings. These drawings can be basic stick figures, simple shapes with volume or something that actually looks like the character. But right now it's more important to get the position right than to have a perfect drawing. And it's more important to get the images into the computer quickly than it is to get the best possible image quality. Shooting your roughs into FlipBook with a web cam or video camera is the fastest way to capture your roughs. FlipBook has several features that make camera capture faster and easier. The images are are captured directly in a traditional exposure sheet with thumbnails and you can make the paper transparent so you can see through lots of layers.
If you animate "straight ahead", doing each drawing in sequence, you can set FlipBook to automatically hold each drawing for one, two or three frames as needed. But when your animation has to fit in a certain time frame you'll probably do the key frames first. Since your key frames won't all be held for the same number of frames FlipBook lets you capture them and set their timing by pressing a number key on your keyboard. When the key frames are timed out and play correctly then you can go back and fill in the in-betweens or move on to the clean-ups.
FlipBook has several features that make camera capture faster and easier. The images are are captured directly in a traditional exposure sheet with thumbnails and you can make the paper transparent so you can see through lots of layers.
If you animate "straight ahead", doing each drawing in sequence, you can set FlipBook to automatically hold each drawing for one, two or three frames as needed. But when your animation has to fit in a certain time frame you'll probably do the key frames first. Since your key frames won't all be held for the same number of frames FlipBook lets you capture them and set their timing by pressing a number key on your keyboard. When the key frames are timed out and play correctly then you can go back and fill in the in-betweens or move on to the clean-ups.
Clean-Up Drawings - Back to the Drawing Board
When the roughs are done and the timing is all worked you're ready to start on the clean-up drawings. This is where you draw one nice steady line in place of the scribbles you had in your roughs. These are the drawings that will be painted and show up in your movie so you want the best quality you can get, even if it takes a little longer. That's why it's important to scan these drawings. FlipBook makes scanning fast and easy too. It can scan the drawings right into the same frames where you put the roughs and it will clean up smudges and erasures while it scales, rotates and registers the images automatically.
There's also a despeckle feature to get rid of small dots left by dark spots on the paper, lint or eraser dust. And you can easily erase things outside of your characters like timing charts and scanning shadows from the edges of the images.
Ink & Paint - With all the Colors of the Rainbow
Whether your film has light, delicate, wispy pastels or strong, bold, saturated colors, FlipBook makes it easy to get just the look you want. And FlipBook has lots of powerful painting tools to help save you time, improve quality and prevent mistakes.
Compositing - Putting it all Together
This part used to require a special camera mounted on a table with lights that would fill an entire room. The background and the transparent cels were attached to peg bars and shot 1 frame at a time. Between each shot someone had to change the cels on the table and if the scene called for a pan or a zoom then someone had to remember to crank the knobs just the right amount for every frame.
Disney's original multiplane camera was several stories tall and required several operators and so many lights they could only use it at night or they'd brown out all of Burbank. Then after working on the camera all night they'd have to wait for the film to be developed, go into a dark room and load it into a projector to see how it turned out.
Now you can set it up on a laptop and let FlipBook do it for you. To pan the background you just set key frames at the beginning and end of the pan and drag the background into place to compose the key frames. FlipBook handles the rest. It changes the drawings, cranks the knobs and clicks the camera for you as it creates a movie file you can watch on any media player, post on the internet or record onto DVD and play on TV.
3D Animation
FlipBook helps 3D animators do better animation faster. The new MayaLink creates a connection between FlipBook and Maya to export your key frames from Maya into FlipBook where you can re-time your key frames with real-time feedback. Directors and teachers can sketch over your key poses to improve the animation. Then FlipBook updates the timing in Maya and transfers the sketches into a Maya image plane for you to use as reference.
Stop Motion Animation
FlipBook is great for stop motion too. Just aim your camera and start clicking. You can see the previous frame while you're posing the next frame. You can step back through the previous frames and forward into the live image. You can even play the scene in real-time pausing on the live image to see how it will look and you can drop out the background and replace it with anything you want.
Website: http://www.digicelinc.com