KINEO – Create your own flipbooks animation in a few minutes

App released 1st April 2010, developed by Geoff Pado, £1.19. RATED 4 Stars!

In the back of a cold west-country classroom there was little to occupy my wandering mind, but an animation masterpiece in the corner of an exercise book certainly passed the hours. Now flipbooks have been thrust into the digital age through a few different apps; my choice was an app called Kineo.

You can choose from nine colors and as standard with most iPhone applications you can shake the phone to undo or wipe the slides completely. A faint version of the previous slide remains on each new screen allowing you to see what you have just drawn.

To ensure fluid movement with your characters can be time consuming but the secret I’ve found is not to worry about perfect drawings, but change only a small amount each slide. After completing maybe ten or twenty slides you can already begin to see your animations spring into life. My animation of a total of 364 screens, when watched with my iPod playing, instantly becomes a low-budget, cartoon music video! Something that would hugely benefit this app is the option to export your animations so you can share them online.

I love the simplicity of Kineo and the childlike nature of the drawings, however the more and more screens, the more loading time needed. There are more expensive and ‘better’ flipbook apps out there, with the added function of layering backgrounds and having more detailed images into your animations. Personally I am not trying to compete with Pixar, just pass some time on the bus, and for this Kineo is perfect.

I can say with certainty that this is an app for all ages. During a long car journey this kept my younger brother busy all the way. And what’s interesting is that what you are creating with Kineo, or any flipbook, is fundamentally the same as any animation feature from Morph and Wallace and Gromit, to The Simpsons and Toy Story.