The second cinemagraph in my COVID19 series. We’re finishing off our second week in lockdown as I write this, and I’ve kept busy with (1) indoor calisthenics, (2) Bitcoin trading, and (3) cryptoart.
But damn I do miss being able to take a break and go outside without a mask on.
This piece is part of Makersplace‘s #COVID19Relief campaign, and partial proceeds of its sale will go to the Global Giving COVID-19 Relief Fund. It’s available now as a 1-of-1 unique digital edition and may be purchased here.
My iPad art program Procreate released their fifth version a few months ago, and it included, amongst other things, an “animation assist” tool that allowed you to do simple cell animation without having to leave the app. My previous cinemagraph The Lockdown was also drawn in Procreate but I opted to export the various elements into Adobe Animate before actually focusing on motion.
Procreate’s Animation Assist mode
The Animation Assist mode itself is quite modest. It’s really just a way to onion-skin your layers and set some timings, and I missed the far more robust features of a full-fledged animation suite. Working with 60+ unique frames was pretty painful, and not having a concept of “symbols” meant that you couldn’t change your mind about a particular element once you’d started animating it. At least, not without redrawing and reanimating every frame.
Still, it was a good experiment and now that I’ve spent a few days with it, I have a better idea what to use it for. I’ll probably stick with my Procreate+Adobe Animate strategy for subsequent cinemagraphs though, as it saves so much time *even* when you consider that I’d be switching from iPad to latop over and over again throughout the process.