I’ve had an iPad for years but never thought to use it for animation. In the past I made only vector-based animations with Illustrator and After Effects using my computer and was intimidated by the idea of hand-drawn animation.
Recently, my roommates and I have pushed ourselves to make short films that have a strict prompt that reads almost like a school assignment:
no people on camera
no dialogue or narration
under 30 seconds
I wanted a story that could fit comfortably in 30 seconds. I wanted the subject to be as small as the project suggested. I wanted to animate it.
I’m not sure why a leaf blowing in the wind is what came to mind but I liked how even in small moments there is an idea of a story and a basic conflict. A leaf vs. the wind.
I started in Procreate and put together some clouds with the water brush. There’s a background cloud, a foreground cloud, and a lone cloud that I can move separately later.
I then took the clouds layers into Final Cut Pro and set keyframes to have them slowly drift from left to right and it created a nice parallax effect. Next up, the branch.
I tried drawing my own branch but was left really disappointed in the result (sorry, I didn’t save these failures). And found a reference painting that I loved to help me trace out a general shape.
Almond Blossoms - Vincent Van Gogh - 1890
With this (cropped) image I traced a very rough outline to get a good head start, detailed the edges, filled it with black, and then used the dry brush to add a harsh light effect. I was really surprised how well the highlighting worked because I wasn’t convinced I knew what I was doing but Procreate amazed me here.
At this point I feel really happy with the composition and the mood it evokes but I have saved the hardest part for last; animating the leaf.
I wasn’t sure what apps existed for this and since I’m only doing a 30 second project I’m not ready to spend money on a professional app I may never use. I started with FlipaClip but they wanted money to remove their watermark. Then Animatic but there was a paper texture for the background that couldn’t be removed or at least I couldn’t figure out how. Eventually I landed on Animation Desk which initially I hated because the entire design of the app bothers me since it doesn’t follow seemingly any iOS Design Guidelines and I couldn’t figure out at first how to make a longer animation. I realized that all I needed to do was cut a 30 second clip of my clouds and branch and import that video into the app and it will generate the length of the project around that.
Screenshot from Animation Desk
I started off with the first leaf that falls since it was the least frames. Then the second one and then the third. After finishing a leaf I would export a copy to my computer in case the app crashed (I was paranoid from an App Store review). I then animated the background leafs one-by-one and saved the hero leaf to the very end since it would be on every frame and I knew it would take me ages.
The last touches I made were with sound. I grabbed an old wind sound I had downloaded years ago for a film and the leaves breaking off the tree was me snapping toothpicks.
Here’s the finished project again
While I’m not 100 percent happy with the movement of the leaf, it appears more like a sock than a brittle piece of nature, for a first project I feel very fulfilled. I wish Animation Desk had a 4K export or at least a .png export (to isolate the leaves) since everything was drawn up in 4K on Procreate but had to be baked-in to a 1080p project though Animation Desk. All in all, it was a fun project and I hope everyone can have that moment where you achieve something creatively you didn’t know you could do! For anyone interested in trying Procreate and if you live near an Apple Store, they just started teaching classes (which are free!) about getting started with drawing on the iPad. I went to one and it was that class that made me believe I could try this!
Happy animating!