This week’s sponsor is Smith Micro. Smith Micro has a number of software products that are specialized for artists such as Anime Studio and MotionArtists.
Don’t let the name Anime Studio fool you – you don’t have to create Anime with it. It’s animation software to create 2D movies, cartoons and cut out animations. It has this cool feature called “Bone-rigging” that maps your character’s joints to a skeleton so that your drawing can move and stay proportional. It can import Photoshop files and convert them to vector. I’ve used Anime Studio before. The learning curve is much, much easier than learning some of the other more expensive animation packages. It’s worth checking out if you’ve had the idea of animating one of your comics or editorial cartoons.
The other package is MotionArtist. MotionArtist helps build interactive sequential stories in an easy drag, drop, point and click process with a “Director’s View” that helps you keep the whole story straight so you can focus on the details. The end product is your story exported as a HTML5 website, or a video you can upload to YouTube or Facebook. There’s a few examples on their website worth checking out.