With these apps, you can do everything from making snaps dance like Harry Potter’s to unleashing your inner cartoonist with scribbly animations.
Stop Motion Studio Pro
Even with a decent phone and this smart app, it’ll take days of effort to fashion your own claymation short or a slice of animated papercraft wizardry. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, it’s packed with quality features such as layers, audio and filters. You just need the skill to avoid your star resembling a knock-off Morph that’s been battered by Tony Hart’s brush.
Enlight Pixaloop
There are plenty of cinemagraph apps that let you take a slice of video and freeze all but a part of it. The magic with Pixaloop is it performs this trick on stills. Load a snap, mask out the bits you want to stay put, drag some arrows, and watch everything animate. It can’t make a human amble across the screen, but the automated motion is very effective on clouds, water and geometric structures.
PicsArt Animator
Remember when you grabbed a marker, drew silly glasses on photos of people and got branded ‘immature’? Use this app to get your own back by making said glasses move, thereby putting you on a direct path to a senior animator position at Disney. Or not. Either way, it’s a fun and powerful app, with a layers system, speed controls and selection tools.
Flugo
While Pixaloop adds free-flowing motion to snaps, Flugo’s aim is to add depth, infusing a kind of 3D effect into any photo. Your part in this is using deft finger- painting to outline which bits of your image are the foreground, middle and background. A few seconds of number-crunching later, and your pic will jiggle around with a striking parallax effect. Fork out for IAP and a portrait mode is unlocked.
Plays: Animation Design Kit
If you mostly share words rather than pictures, you might be feeling a bit left out. Never fear, because Plays lets you get animated with letters. Type a tweet-sized missive and you can then add backgrounds, colour characters, and select an effect to hurl the letters around the screen, often making them unreadable – which might well be an improvement.
CoreAnimator
Advanced animation is the preserve of desktop apps, but CoreAnimator sidles towards that turf. You’ll need to prepare images elsewhere and break them into parts, ready for animating. The app’s timeline and keyframe system then offers plenty of control as you craft animated epics. The results… well, they won’t scare Pixar, but they could be enough for a cult following on YouTube.
