2D animation techniques
TL;DR
- There are some good animation application options around, but none of them do exactly what I want, or are even close to what I want.
- The most important thing for me is to have a flexible method that I can use with AI. The problem with a lot of applications is there is no way to easily use them with AIs.
- Also (as I found with MoviePy) the AIs are not good with applications that have a small user-base, or where there are new recent versions.
- LLMs mean that it is easy to make my own mini applications. This is an ideal case for that. Also fun. So I’ll do that.
- It always feels like a bit of a waste of time doing this kind of research, but it’s necessary to explore options even if I reject them all. Experimenting is important. Doing this has given me some interesting ideas.
You’ll have seen on this website that I create little cartoon illustrations to go with the stories. I fancy trying to animate those. I would also like to be able to do animations for titles for videos, or to illustrate my talks. I love Procreate and so tried using Procreate Dreams, but found it frustrating to use and I didn’t enjoy it. Also I want to be able to do scripted animations, because you can then get Gen AI to write scripts, and can edit them easily.
MoviePy
I asked Claude to suggest something to do this with and it suggested MoviePy, which I’ve never come across before. It’s an established project and looks very interesting, so I have played with it a bit. One thing I don’t like much is the documentation. Claude wasn’t up to date with the new 2.0 version of MoviePy, so I wanted to just upload the documentation, but the documentation is spread over loads of web pages and in order to get it in a single document I would have to build it with Sphinx, which is too much of a pain. So I’m abandoning this option for the moment, although I may come back to it.
Both Claude and ChatGPT Deep Research suggested Blender, which I’ve never really worked with. It could be worth spending some time getting to know it.
2D animation with Blender
After a bit of trial and error I got Claude to create a script that created a bouncing ball animation. The Blender interface is sooo complex, What I want to do is actually fairly simple. So I think Blender is overkill.
Synfig Studio
The next option from ChatGPT Deep Research was Synfig Studio, another one I’ve not heard of. Looks like both a fairly old and currently active Open Source project, which is good news. Not optimized for Apple Silicon, which is not such good news. Also the project is not registeed with Apple, so OSX doesn’t want to open it. Looking at the forum isn’t very inspiring, it doesn’t look like anyone is making good quality stuff with this. Moving on…
Rive
Rive is very interesting, and if I had more free time I would play with it, but I don’t think it does what I want. And I don’t like that it’s closed source.
Godot
Godot is a very interesting option. Open Source and extremely active, and definitely capable of what I want to do, and more.