At about this time last year, I wrote about flipbooks, FlipNote Studio, and the animator, Yoichi Kotabe. Well, Kotabe-san has no relevance to this entry, but I would like to review the rest of that post.
As three days from now will have been one entire year since I've had my Nintendo DSi, I can now say without fear of contradiction that FlipNote Studio is not my favourite programme.
I anticipated that people would not take the application all that seriously, drawing stickfigures, bouncing cubes, stuff sprouting out of the ground -- but, I couldn't have been more incorrect. I forgot to take into account the sort of person Nintendo attracts: Japanophiles with knowledge of anime. Also, it seems that more than a few people have figured out how to use FlipNote Studio as I've done with Microsoft Paint -- how to make pixel art with it. People have managed to recreate sprites from Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Kirby's Adventure, and other NES games and used them to make demonstrations of their aptitude for level design. Some people use spriting to make dramatic serials involving characters from videogames.
...And, of course, there's a website to showcase all of this. When one finishes one's animation, one can connect to the Internet and post to FlipNote Hatena.
One year ago, I anticipated using FlipNote Studio in my spare time (that is, any time I'm not composing or improvising music). It seems to me as though more than a few people's lives have been wholly absorbed by FlipNote Studio. Me, I've done some stage-falling stickfigures and a lip-synching crash dummy. Someone else, they've done dramatic tales of Mario embarking on a Legend of Zelda-like quest to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser or Wario (or Luigi doing the same for Princess Daisy).
It's rather like hearing about so-called "homebrew" software for Wii. You know it exists and you've seen demonstrations, but you can't possibly fathom how it was accomplished, as the skill level required to make it is far above your own. There are things that I will never understand that others can do in their sleep.
Now that I've had a year to try it out, I've decided that FlipNote Studio is very much beyond my grasp.
