Animating on iPad: FlipaClip, ToonSquid, and Procreate Dreams
When it comes to animation, there’s a lot of possible ways to do it. Not only is there physical and digital media, but there’s also multiple different types of animation to consider. As for this article, though, we’ll be focusing on digital animation, more specifically, animating on iPad.
There are countless apps for animating on an iPad. However, there are few great apps in the bunch. To start off, I want to talk about FlipaClip: the first ever mobile animation program I came to use. I’ve known FlipaClip since around 2015 or so, only a couple years after its release in 2012. The app was developed by 3 brothers who loved creating, as the FlipaClip website itself highlights.
This created a huge and amazing community of animators of all ages who came together to innovate with the app. Countless tutorials, animations, experimental uploads, I’m confident enough to say a huge portion of the community who’s used FlipaClip since its release has grown up alongside it and the release of its newer features.
Now, onto a more modern approach for animating on iPad: ToonSquid. I will admit I’ve just now purchased it, less than a month ago, but it’s been released since around August of 2022. FlipaClip has added a lot of features since it came out, but none compare to everything ToonSquid has to offer. Lots of brush options, the possibility for hand drawn and keyframe animation, symbols, vector brushes, bones and rigging, effects, layer masking, easing curves, vector shapes, camera, and an amazing timeline… What else could you possibly ask for in a mobile animation app? Absolutely nothing!
I’ve been really excited to give ToonSquid a go because I’ve seen some of the things people are able to make with it and they’re absolutely insane! So many possibilities and tools in a single mobile animation app is genuinely a dream come true. If this existed when I started animating on my old iPad, I would probably be a completely different person today.
To close things off with some “competition”... Procreate Dreams. In case you don’t know much about art and animation apps or iPads, Procreate Dreams is some sort of extension (though it’s a whole separate app) to an Apple-exclusive art app: Procreate. Base Procreate already had a pretty basic animation feature, but they made Procreate Dreams to focus on that feature a lot more and make it the app’s main focus instead.
To sum everything up nicely, Procreate Dreams tried to be everything ToonSquid is and failed miserably around its initial release in 2023. It wasn’t too intuitive, was lacking some essential, core features that other apps already had, and felt a little clunky in general.
In conclusion, my favorite way to animate quickly on an iPad has to be FlipaClip. It’s intuitive, beginner friendly, and straight to the point. However, I’m looking forward to learning more about ToonSquid and how it works, especially considering I’m curious to see how many possibilities all its tools have to offer. And, as for Procreate Dreams, I might give it another shot one day - but with the sour taste it left on my tongue after a rough first impression, it might be a while until I do.
References
Voorhees, J., & Voorhees, J. (2023, 22 noviembre). Procreate dreams first impressions. MacStories. https://www.macstories.net/stories/procreate-dreams-first-impressions/