The equation that explains why all life was created.
I'm sure you've done it at some time or other...
You have some extra time on your hands, so you look around your cubicle or school desk to see what you can do to stave off a visit from Mister Sand-Man. "Hmm," you say to yourself, "A pen, a notepad... hey, I've got a zany idea!"
You start to draw a little figure on the edge of the paper. Maybe a stick figure or a ball, maybe a cube. Anyhow, you draw it once -- turn the page -- draw it again, only with slight differences -- turn the page -- draw it again, variating it slightly again. Repeating this process ten or fifteen times, you cap your pen, return to the first page of the notepad, and flip through the pages.
In this manner, you have created a flipbook.
What is a flipbook? Technically speaking, a flipbook is a crude method of stop-motion animation. Stop-motion (or, "claymation" -- a misnomer, as not all stop-motion is clay-based) is the process of animating a figure by photographing it, moving it slightly, photographing it again, moving it slightly, and doing this until viewing the photographs in sequence at high speed creates the illusion that the figure is moving on its own.
Have you seen Wallace & Gromit? Chicken Run? That execrable Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that CBS insists on showing every Christmas? All of that is stop-motion. Basically, a fancy feature-length flipbook.
I remember back in primary school, I was rather, shall we say, "obsessed" with flipbooks. It all started when I got a Toy Story flipbook from someplace or other. It was the scene where Woody tricks Buzz Lightyear into believing there is an alien behind him, then Woody laughs until he falls over. On the reverse side was Rex roaring at Mr. Potato Head and blowing all of his parts off.
I figured, "Hey, I can make something like this!", so I gathered all of the notepads I could find (I even nicked one from school -- don't tell anyone) and started animating like mad.
Of course, the attention span of an eight-year-old is not that lengthy, and I started doing other things after a week or so.
Why do I bring this up?
I've gotten myself a Nintendo DSi for Christmas this year. To prepare for what I want to do with the console once I open the package on the 25th, I decided to go to the DSi website, just to look at what is available, DSiWare-wise. One can't own a DSi and not take advantage of DSiWare... it's just not done.
Well, as it happens, a couple of Nintendo staffers came up with the idea to make a virtual flipbook into which one can draw with the stylus.
What really got me hooked into this FlipNote Studio, as it's called, was a demo animation made by Aardman Animation Studios. As any Wallace & Gromit fan can tell you, Aardman are crazy good at stop-motion animating.
Looking into the matter further, I found that the application had been the subject of the "Iwata Asks" segment (wherein Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata, interviews people involved with development of consoles and certain games). There were two interviews: one with the developers, one with a veteran animator who worked for Nintendo until 2007. This animator, one Yoichi Kotabe, actually designed Mario's modern appearance, as well as those of everyone else in the Mario series. At the end of that interview, he was asked to use FlipNote Studio (known as Ugomemo in Japan) to make short animations.
After I found all of this information, I knew I would be using FlipNote Studio. And I shall.
However, until December 25th, I've found my old notepads and I've started drawing stick figures again. And again, and again, and again, and again, and...
