Flip Boom All Star
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
When you launch FBAS, you get a drawing space, tools on the left side, the character and avatar selections on the right. At the bottom is a slim strip with an upper and a lower layer – this is particularly useful.
For example, draw or import an image in the bottom panel, and this becomes your background. Now click in the panel above, and either draw or drag a character into this. Now, Select All and drag-select operations don’t effect the background, making quick selections that much easier.
If your background isn’t going to change, you can copy the first panel and click and paste into all the subsequent panels – a one-click or one-command option to achieve this would be appreciated, but you can click in a lower frame, copy, click in the next and paste. .
The practice would be to draw, drag, or drag and animate your picture or character over the top. When it’s right, copy that to the next panel, modify it a little and continue.
You can press Play (and you can turn Loop on and off) at any time to keep track of how your animation is panning out, and you can change frame rates.
Between frames the animation appears smooth even at 12 frames per second – but you can crank it op to a max of 99.
Basically, this Flash-based software lets you do what the more sophisticated Flash Catalyst lets you do, but the skew is definitely towards cartoonery, with drawing tools and character selections to match The preset library has the groups Animals, Avatars, Backgrounds, Bubbles, Characters (Dog, Boy, Girl, Sailor, Clown, Man Walking and many others), Creatures, Genie, Props, Shapes and Accessories.
There’s also a limited Colour Palette near top right – double-clicking a colour lets you tweak it beyond the basic selection of 15, and these tweaked versions get saved into the palette.
The various tools are pretty easy to use as you can leave your mouse pointer over them for a few seconds and a big tool tip pops up. From the Tools menu you can group and ungroup elements – ungroups a dragged on library item, for example, to edit its elements individually.
However, I found it difficult to fill a shape – often changing the colour just changed the outline colour. I was probably missing something.
I was – click the Fill tool on the left first and all was good.
Also, clicking an item and then dragging it dragged the fill and not the outline – I found it impossible to select or drag both. But there are icons along the top that let you instantly move a shape above or below whatever else overlaps it – this is handy and useful.
Clicking on any object lets you resize with any of the four corner handles, and a 5th handle in the middle of the right-vertical frame lets you rotate on the fly.
If you’ve already been working with the studio’s offerings, FlipBoom All-Star can open and edit other projects produced with FlipBoom Classic, Comic and Animation-ish.
Toon Boom Studios has put some sample animations online that will give you the idea.
Sound
Adding sound is easy. You can import an MP3 file by clicking the musical note icon at lower right, then choosing one – then you get a basic editing interface to help you set samples to parts of the animation. You can also fit a sound to the animation just by checking a checkbox; but this doesn’t modify the sample; rather it shows where the last frame falls with a yellow marker. You can drag this around and the count changes to reflect where in your project you are, to raise or lower the sound accordingly. That’s because, as with GarageBand, you can click to place markers on the sample and raise or lower them to raise and lower the volume, one for each channel.
However, you can’t drag the sample itself around to change its position relative to the frames, although you can put in numerical start and stop frames.
This all may be a bit crude, but it’s definitely better than I expected. If you tailored a sound in an external editor to the frames and what happens where, once again, this could lead to a sophisticated result.
Although many of the tools are self explanatory and some common commands work – for example, holding down the Option key and then dragging drags a copy out, just like it does in the Finder, Photoshop, Illustrator and many other applications, and the Shift key to select multiples works as usual – some commonly accepted shortcuts don’t work – for example, hitting the space bar to Play an animation or sound sample (this works in iTunes, QuickTime, iMovie, GarageBand etc).
Sharing is easy – when you Export you can choose to upload your animation directly to facebook, YouTube or your iPod. The facebook export requires a certain minimum frame-rate and length and it only tells you half-way through the export, unfortunately, which then cancels. It would be better to get this warning first. Actually, I also got this rather bizarre warning (below), which told me I needed more frames while also saying I had more than enough. So that probably needs some work, but there was no Check for Updates feature for me to use to see if I had the latest version.
Conclusion: This is not the answer to your sophisticated animation needs – rather, it’s a quick entry into producing very cartoonish animations. As such, with some perseverance and skill, and particularly since you can import sounds and images captured digitally, you may be shocked at the level of sophistication you can achieve.
What's great: Ease of use and bonus fee templates, click here.
What's not: Slightly inconsistent interface and dialogue boxes
Needs: Anyone with cartoon animation needs and no time for a steep learning curve.
What: Flip Boom All Star, US$69.99 online only (about NZ$97 – cross-grade from Flip Boom Classic US$29.99)
System: Intel processor, Mac OS 10.6; 1GB RAM; monitor supporting 1280x1024 resolution; free Adobe Flash Player (there’s also a Windows version).
Contact: Toon Boom
