Tags: Animations

Create 2D Animated Movies in Flash or QuickTime with Pencil

- Thursday, May 28, 2015 No Comments

Pencil is a drawing cum 2D animation software that’s free but offers features that you would normally find in expensive programs like Adobe Flash or Toon Boom Studio.

Pencil is designed to mimic the traditional drawing and animation process where animation artists draw individual frames and play them in sequence but at a very high speed.

With Pencil, you begin by drawing a sketch on the canvas using the inbuilt tools. That’s your first keyframe. You then continue sketching other frames and compile to complete the animation.

Pencil also supports Onion Skins so you can reference the previous frame while sketching consecutive frames. Then there’s a camera layer for adding perspective to you animations.

Finally, drawings or 2D Animations created with Pencil can be exported to a variety of formats including SWF Flash, QuickTime MOV or a sequence of PNG image files.

Pencil is available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. It also works with your touch screen Tablet PC.

Tags: Tutorials

How to Stop GIF Image Animations from Playing in the Browser

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Unlike Macromedia Flash movies, you cannot right click GIF animations (or Cinemagraphs) and stop them from playing over and over in your browser. 

Here's a very simple trick to prevent GIF graphics from animating in your web browser window - once the web page has stopped loading and GIF frames start to animate, just hit the ESC key on your keyboard.

That will immediately disable all the GIF animations on that webpage. In order to replay the animated images, you'll have to reload the page by pressing F5 or Ctrl+R.

How to Disable GIF Animations

If you want to permanently block GIF animations in your browser, do the following:

In Firefox - Type about:config and change the value of string image.animation_mode from normal to none.

In Internet Explorer - Tools -> Options -> Advance. Uncheck the box in Multimedia group that says "Play animations in web pages"