Toon Boom for Kids

I just received the announcement email for Toon Boom Kids. I just wanted to applaud Toon Boom for recognizing the need for a basic application that will help children learn to grow into animation and the more sophisticated tools that Toon Boom Express, Studio and Digital Pro can offer.

Also, keeping the price below $50 is really an excellent strategy.

Rock on,
–Will

I’ll second that. I was very happy to see that email, it’s a great idea & shouldn’t be too intimidating for kids at all.

I actually just downloaded the 7 day trial to check it out. I have a few nieces & nephews that like to draw & Christmas is coming & whatnot, so I figured I’d play with it a bit.

I’ll have a little blog post soon with details & a short example, but in short I think it’s a really cool little program. The interface is definitely geared towards a kid, with easy to read large buttons, & not too many where it would get confusing. The essential tools for animation are there & easily accessible.

Only small crits I have are that there is no shape tool, which I didn’t think would be too much to include, even just a circle & rectangle tool would add a lot of possibilities for a youngster. Also, while onin skinning is available (very cool), in the example I made ( a flower growing) I did a simple BG first, duplicated 10 frames, then animated the flower on top in the foreground. Because of this, the oninon skin only showed a fully painted screen. I realize painting the BG last is the solution to that, but maybe adding the use of one more layer would be cool too. Just a thought for future editions.

All in all a great product & I’m sure it will turn many kids on to the joys of seeing their drawings come to life.

I’ve just downloaded and been playing with FlipBoom to see if it would be a good gift for my 7 year old granddaughter.

Looks really good so far, but I can’t find the ZOOM tool. I’m pretty sure that a youngster would benefit by being able to zoom into small areas, like eyes, to be able to see/draw them better.

Did I just miss it?

thanks,

Paz

Hi Paz,

There is no actual zoom in Flip Boom since what you see and draw is always what you get in your render view. This was done to simplify the drawing and exporting.

I would get the only way to do really tiny details would be to lower your screen resolution at the moment.

Best regards,

Ugo

Ugo,

Thanks. I had some problems trying to use the paint bucket to fill eye areas in particular, due to gaps I cannot zoom in to see. I couldn’t get the nose to fill at all, and eventually tried to fill one eye with the paint brush, but that didn’t work well.

I did this on my laptop without using a mouse or a Wacom tablet, because I felt it would be closer to the experience my granddaughter would be likely to have - especially since at age 7, she does not have a Wacom tablet!, lol

On the whole, the program is GREAT, but I’d hate to give her something that she couldn’t possibly get ‘right.’ Her drawing skills are already good, but if I can’t do it, then I don’t expect her to be able to.

I’ll try screen resolution, but I’m afraid that might be beyond her current capabilities (and my son’s patience!) at her age too.

I wonder if it would be possible to add a small magnifying area - sort of like the ‘loop’ on Adobe’s Bridge Image viewer program? Or some other means of closing gaps?

thanks again,

Paz

http://www.patriceart.com/flipboom/rabbit.mov

http://www.patriceart.com/flipboom/rabbit.swf

Interesting, the Quick Time version won’t open for me.

Watching the .swf I see one other thing I struggled with, the maximum size of the brush stroke, but it didn’t take long to figure out that the way to beat that is to draw a total selection on the perimeter of the area I wanted to become a background.

And of course, I see now that my total ‘ear’ needs to be drawn as a separate area and then filled in order to ‘wiggle’ it!

It would be nice if the eraser could be set to erase only the chosen color as well…

I guess the wish list will always go on and on!

thanks again, I’ll try screen resolution!

Hi,

Something else you might want to try is the draw behind in those kind of situation where you have really small gaps to fill. Since it will only paint behind whatever you already did this should be useful to paint small area.

Best regards,

Ugo

Yes, good idea. Thanks!

I’ll keep at it.

Hi Strux,

What you do mean by clipart? Flip Boom does not have any import features yet so you can only copy and paste content you have done inside Flip Boom in another frame or project of Flip Boom.

Regards,

Ugo

Also, while onin skinning is available (very cool), in the example I made ( a flower growing) I did a simple BG first, duplicated 10 frames, then animated the flower on top in the foreground. Because of this, the oninon skin only showed a fully painted screen

Excellent point, KDog.

After reading your post, I tried working around that limitation by drawing the perimeter of my background areas and then going back and filling them with the paintbucket at the end. Not an elegant solution, but better than solid fill.

Here’s an example:

http://www.patriceart.com/flipboom/punkolantern.swf

FWIW, I posted this in a small forum I run and one of the guys is planning on buying FlipBoom for two of his grandchildren, and I’ve decided it’s a go for my granddaughter too, after checking with my son and finding out for certain that she is allowed to use one of the computers in their home. I think she’s going to love it.

yeah that was the best solution I came up with as well, which is why I say it would be cool if Flip Boom supported just one more layer. I don’t think that would get too confusing for most kids, & it would allow for a BG on a separate layer, making animating the drawings in the foreground easier to see with the onion skin.

Overall though I agree with you & have recommended Flip Boom to a bunch of friends & relatives with kids.

I agree completely re: a background layer… and still think a zoom in tool or gap closing tool would be another - necessary? – asset for the program.

It must be very difficult to create something new like this, to keep it simple enough for children, yet robust enough that it can give good results.

I like it enough to buy it as is, and do hope our suggestions will be considered in the next update/upgrade of the program.

Hi,

Those are indeed nice features that could be seen in the upcoming version of the application.

Best regards,

Ugo

We got Flip Boom for our 5 year-old and she loves it. She did most of the work (with a little help from her Mommy) for this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WXS16-X0c0

We had actually thought for a while that you could only use the basic colors on the screen there, but Becca showed us how to double-click into them to get a bigger palette. There are a couple of things that I think would be nice to add to Flip Boom, like the ability to zoom in… but otherwise it’s a really great starter program for budding animators, no matter what their age.

Actually, my wife really likes using it, too, since she’s just starting to learn animation herself. Prior to this, she’s only used MS Paint, so Toon Boom’s interface was a little daunting. She made this video, using Flip Boom to create the drawings and animations, and then we imported the Flash files into TBS to edit and compile everything… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-xZvPRHFFo