And if you want to take sound out of the equation, you can easily convert your Flipnote into an animated. You can also browse these animations through the Nintendo DSi: the downloads are near instantaneous thanks to the tiny sizes of the files. Through this site you can view animations in a You Tube-like Flash video clip, which means you can do what I did and embed a video window on your webpage, blog, or Facebook account to show off your cartoons. You can collaborate with friends by transferring your file directly to their DSi, or - after registering for an account – upload directly to the internet via the Flipnote Hatena social network website. What makes Flipnote Studio even more fantastic is its ability to share the animations.
For my animation I had Greg Miller be my foley artist to come up with the sounds you hear in my Deadly Drop animation. Adding audio is extraordinarily easy as well: you can simply record a foley session as the animation's playing out. At any time you can hit down on the D-pad to play what you've already laid out, and tapping up will pull the toolkit down so you can change your brush, color (you can paint in black, blue, red, or white), and undo any mistakes you've made along the way. This light box feature shows off the four previous frames so you can get a good scope of what your animation's going to do. What you drew on the previous frame will be displayed in a transparent "onion skin" so you can easily match up your next frame of animation. The interface uses a brilliantly simple touchscreen/D-pad combination: draw on the screen, then tap right on the D-pad to move to Frame 2. Its simplicity is the reason why Flipnote Studio is so amazing, because it takes very little effort to pull off animations you can be proud of. But for the most part you'll be able to pull off some seriously amazing stuff if you work within the program's limitations.
Even with the enhanced abilities, you still can't select an entire snippet of animation frames and copy them into a different part of your animation. In the basic mode, you can't crop out tiny objects and slide them around the frame, but if you enable the "advanced options" you get full select, copy and paste. Sure, there will be a few times when you'll say to yourself, "I wish I could…." That's what the "advanced options" are for. The program has been made to be as simple to use as possible, so you won't be overwhelmed with options beyond simple animation abilities. For someone like me, it means a cartoon like this: That 15 second animation took about an hour of work from start to finish, and incorporates nearly every aspect of Flipnote Studio's features. This is an extremely simple, yet fully featured animation program that enables anyone with any sense of stylus skills to produce animations of significant quality quickly. Flipnote Studio is the index card stack for today's generation. Usually these stories ended up with Nameless Stick Man blowing up or breaking his spine. My artistic talent barely crosses the "stick figure" skills, but I had fun putting together some barely cohesive narratives. Like many of you, when I was younger I spent my downtime stapling together index cards and stealing stacks of Post-it Notes so I could produce stupid flipbook animations. The fact that it's a free download makes it all that much sweeter. The potential is there, but for the past three months Nintendo hasn't really made huge strides to entice DS Lite owners to upgrade to the next generation – the DSiWare line-up is all over the place in quality and the ones that are considered "good" don't really do a good job pitching the system to someone content with the already great (and cheaper) DS Lite system.įlipnote Studio, just released in the US, is the first piece of software for the Nintendo DSi that makes me comfortable in saying that you now should upgrade to the new system. But it's been extremely difficult to convince existing DS Lite owners to make the jump. I'm in the camp that believes that – even with the lack of GBA slot - the DSi is a superior handheld system to the DS Lite.