After we had been shown how to animate in photoshop, I decided to look at some other apps that would allow for hand drawn frame by frame animation also.

Flipaclip

A well known, and well used free app lots of people use is Flipaclip. This is a simple animation app which is very easy to use, its works using layers and frames, and you can customise how many frames per second you want to use, which goes from 1 - 30 FPS. It has other basic function such as importing photos, and even has a simple program to put in audio, either from their collection or you can edit and splice in your own. This is all operated on mobile.

Here I did a very simple animation of a boy in a pool about to be hunted by this shadowy creature. I didn't finish the animation, but you can see how each frame is hand drawn and the way it progresses from rough sketch to final animation.

Here you can see the same frame with and without the boy to demonstrate how the effect of the shadow crawling across was done.

Pixilart

The next app I used was Pixilart, surprisingly this simple pixel art app had a very rudimentary animation feature.

It was extremely basic, it has severe limitations such as you could not copy and paste layers across frames, you could only duplicate a whole layer one by one. For this reason I decided to create a very simple animation, which proved to take a while since it was finicky, luckily it does have onion skins.