Small Animator

We present sketch based interactive animation system for kids, to help them animate multiple character with path following technique using waveform as a path, so they can enjoy animating their hand drawing with less and simple operation. The traditional cartoon animation requires drawing each frame by hand. Computer based animation can generate interpolated frames, however the user should set the start and the end of the poses on the key-frames. Both ways take time and effort and not suitable for kids. Instead of these approaches, there are several animation systems designed mainly for novice users, which simply move and rotate a 2D image. Although an animation single character can be created easily, the user still has to set a key-frame for each character when moving multiple characters, and if not the characters will have the same time of appearance and movement. Our goal is to design an animation system, especially for kids, which solves these problems; kids can control multiple characters to have different movement without the completeness of individually operating ones with kid friendly user operations. The system’s window is divided in two canvases beside each other, one for drawing the character, the other one for making the animation. The process starts by making the kids draw any character they want in the drawing window, then press on the add button to add the characters on the path to start following it. Using sound waveform captured from microphone as a path, and the absence of the key frame will reduce the operations of making the animation, so the kids were able to finish animating their hand drawing in tens of seconds.