Here is the short version of the review: it's like Flipnote Studio. Only better.
Flipnote Studio
Only better
Now, onto the long version!
Flipnote Studio 3D is a free animation tool for the Nintendo 3DS system. Released in Japan in July of 2013, the rest of the world has been waiting ever since its promised international launch of August 2013 came and went without its arrival. Now, the rest of the gaming world is on the brink of finally getting their hands on this awesome application. Here's my review of the Japanese version of the app, focusing mainly on the animation and drawing tools. (Also, there will be a lot of animated GIFs of various quality.)
Hadouken!
When you first create a new Flipnote, you will be greeted with a blank canvas. Tapping the frog in the bottom-left corner (or pressing up on the D-pad or circle pad) will bring up the various tools at your disposal, spread across 3 pages. The first page gives you your 3 most basic drawing tools: a pencil, a paintbrush, and an eraser. The pencil's main job is to draw lines, and there are six different sized tips to do this job (pressing the L button reveals the larger sizes). The pencil tool gives you access to various airbrushes too, as well as a line with variable thickness based on the speed of your stroke.
Hole in one!
A feature new to Flipnote Studio 3D is the text entry tool, represented by a letter "A" in the pencil settings. This feature is sure to be a relief to Flipnote Studio users. Dedicated creators using the DSi app painstakingly created their own pixel fonts, and copied the letters one by one to the desired page. Using the tool in FS3D is fairly self-explanatory, and useful as well.
Cats don't dance. But they keep falling over.
The paintbrush tool is designed for when you want to add shading, or mix colors. The repeating patterns of pixels provided by the brush perform this function well, and add a unique charm to Flipnote-based drawings. Pressing L while viewing the various painbrushes reveals not only larger brushes, but also a "paint bucket" tool to fill a large enclosed area. This feature was relegated to a strage easter egg involving the microphone in the original Flipnote Studio, so it's good to finally have this crucial feature firmly in place. You can even fill in an area with a solid color, something that you couldn't do so easily in the original. The last tool on the first page, the eraser tool, should be pretty self-explanatory. It works exactly as it did in Flipnote Studio.
This guy didn't sign up for Club Nintendo.
The third page of tools has a wide variety of editing and animation tools. You can change the background color of the current page, or turn the lightbox on and off. The Select tool allows you to lasso a selection of the page and move, cut, copy, and paste the selection. The new Edit tool lets you smoothly rotate and zoom the current layer or page, and the new Shapes tool draws perfect lines, squares, rectangles, circles, and ellipses.
And the improvements don't stop there. Flipnotes can now use 6 different colors (white, black, red, blue, green, and yellow), and 3 layers. And I can't forget the 3D effect! Using 3 layers at different depths can make Flipnotes much more visually interesting. In addition, Flipnotes can be saved/exported as AVI movies for sharing on YouTube, Facebook, and other sites.
I guess you could say Flipnote Studio 3D is a...slam dunk.
With all these tools in place, Flipnote users have many different ways to animate. You can painstakingly draw each individual frame, or use the Select and Edit tools to move around your drawing from the previous frame. A combination of these methods probably works best, but there's not one right way to create Flipnotes. You can create the funny looping GIFs like the ones that litter this review, you can make music videos featuring wolves or stickmen with hats, or you can make an epic, 91-part animated action series.
I haven't mentioned every single feature and improvement in Flipnote Studio 3D, but I hope you get the main idea: this is a huge improvement over Flipnote Studio. It's better in literally every way. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this music video I created myself. I hope it's a pretty decent showcase of what you can do with this awesome application, and a demonstration of a few different animation techniques. Full tutorials will come later. But for now...I can't wait to see what you all create!
Flipnote Studio and Flipnote Studio 3D are more powerful tools than they are given credit for. It's easy to focus on their shortcomings: for example, low audio quality, low resolution, and limited audio length. But despite these flaws, there are numerous ways that animators of any experience level can use Flipnote Studio in their projects. Here are my top 5.
1. Storyboards
As many readers of this blog will know, Shigeru Miyamoto used Flipnote Studio to storyboard his Pikmin short films. The storyboards are included as bonus content when you download the films for Wii U or 3DS. There is better storyboard software available, but Flipnote Studio has the advantages of being portable, simple, and free. You can even change the speed and add sound effects. Whee!
2. Create resources
This idea comes from one of my favorite projects involving Flipnote Studio, seen above. (Watch it in HD and full screen!) The creator of this video, Arman Bohn, used Flipnote Studio to create over 250 objects, and exported them as GIFs. These resources were then composed into a music video, using professional editing software AfterEffects. The final product isn't a "Flipnote" by any stretch of the imagination, but the beautifully jaggy line art associated with Flipnote shines through in this music video. Again, the advantage is that the creator didn't have to be at home, or at work, or anywhere in particular to create the resources. They could be drawn on a bus ride, or while laying in bed.
3. Draw scenes
This idea is much less editing-intensive than the previous one, but it still works quite well. For this music video, the creator exported many scenes from Flipnote Studio, and compiled these scenes to sync with the music. This entire music video (minus the music) could be entirely created using Flipnote Studio and Windows Movie Maker. And it still tells a beautifully sad story with awesomely stylized art.
4. Rough animation
This technique is great for those who have an animation software like Flash or Toon Boom Studio, but find drawing with a drawing tablet to be...less than ideal. (Especially if you have a simple tablet with no screen.) With Flipnote Studio, you can draw directly on the screen without buying a $1000 Cintiq. Then, you can export the animation as a GIF, import it into your software of choice, and trace over the lines to clean things up. (Or you could, you know, use a pencil and paper. But who does that these days?)
5. Do everything in Flipnote Studio!
If you do this strategy, you are committing to dealing with all the limitations that come with Flipnote Studio. You'll have to record your audio using the tiny and tinny DSi microphone. By the way, the audio has to be under one minute long, is that okay? Oh, and don't forget the file size limit Flipnotes have. You know, the dreaded "Space Bar?" That's right, even one minute of animation is too large most of the time. But despite all of these limitations with creating a "true" Flipnote...they're the only thing you can post on Flipnote HatenaSudomemo, and as such, the only thing that can receive Stars. So really, it's a no-brainer.
That's the article, folks. What else can you use Flipnote Studio for? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments!
A lot of people think that Nintendo is not releasing Flipnote Studio 3D because it would not bring them a lot of profit. And they have a point: after the 30-day free trial, they will only get about $0.99 per month per user. And that's only users who care enough to get a subscription! But here are a few ways Nintendo could significantly increase their profits from Flipnote Studio 3D.
1. Flipnote Gallery: World subscription: $0.99 a month
This is the most obvious, since it's already a planned part of the service. The small fee, when multiplied by the number of users, likely helps pay for the gallery's servers and moderation. And it gives subscribers 100 Coins, 3 Star Coins, and access to FG:W at any hour of the day or night. Not a bad deal.
2. Star Coin packs: $0.99 each
Since Star Coins are required to a) post a Flipnote with the guarantee that it won't be taken down in 30 days and b) add a Creator to your favorites, it's pretty obvious that most users will be dying for more than 3 each month. So if Nintendo offered the ability to purchase a pack of 5 or so Star Coins for $0.99, it's obvious that people would be interested, both Creators and Collectors.
3. Premium Subscription: $4.99 per month
Even with a subscription, you are pretty limited with what you can do on Flipnote Gallery: World. Almost every action requires a coin: commenting on, posting, downloading, and of course, rating Flipnotes. And you only have 100 per month. For a lot of people, that will be enough. But not for dedicated Flipnote Fans.
Nintendo should offer a Premium subscription service for those who are more serious about their Flipnote. With a premium subscription, you would be able to post, comment, and download Flipnotes for free. No coin required. That way, all 100 of your coins could go toward rating Flipnotes.* If Nintendo offered a premium subscription, all types of Flipnote fans would be willing to pay the extra price. People there for the social experience could chat without worrying about conserving Coins. Hardcore Flipnote collectors could download unlimited Flipnotes to their SD cards for their own personal enjoyment.
A Premium subscription service, even one that's not exactly like the one I described here, would greatly increase Nintendo's profit from Flipnote Studio 3D.
*I considered the idea that the Premium subscription would give unlimited Coins--but that would utterly neglect the purpose of limiting the Coins in the first place. A limited number of Coins (for adding to Flipnotes) GREATLY increases the value of coins when compared to Stars. Stars were unlimited and thus literally worthless. One person could add a million Stars if he (or she) had enough patience. Stars were so worthless that Hatena calculated popularity based on the number of people who added stars, not the number of stars added. So all that time adding stars was wasted. One star = 1,000,000 stars from the same person to Hatena's popularity algorithm. With a limited number of Coins, Nintendo can (more) reliably use the number of coins per person as an indicator of quality.
In Conclusion
If Nintendo were to offer premium services such as Star Coin packs, or a Premium subscription, they could gain a lot more income from Flipnote Studio 3D. And people who are not interested in such features could easily ignore them. It's a win-win situation. So why is Nintendo not doing this?
For one thing, it would take some time and resources to incorporate such ideas into the software. But the main reason is that Nintendo Co., Ltd. doesn't think it's necessary! Apparently, the $0.99 a month subscription (or 100 yen) is enough to justify running Flipnote Gallery: World in Japan. In other words, it would also be enough if Flipnote Studio 3D were to be released in the West.
Since Nintendo is not desperate to make more money from Flipnote Studio 3D (not to mention that they have released Miiverse on 3DS (completely free) since FS3D was delayed), we can assume that the application is not being delayed because of financial reasons. The real reason remains an elusive and frustrating mystery.
Restitution. To be honest, most Flipnote fans would just be happy if Nintendo just released the dang thing. It has been a year now, after all. But some fans want a little something extra as restitution for the long wait. We asked our fans what they would have Nintendo do to make things fair. Most of the responses were something like this:
Extra coins and/or free months would be appreciated for sure, and it's probably the most likely thing (if Nintendo does decide to offer restitution). But they aren't the most creative answers.
Austin Burk, known for creating Sudomemo, wants Nintendo to purchase his homemade Flipnote Hatena server. Sorry Sudofox: I don't think that will happen.
Several people gave this suggestion. What if Nintendo gave some eShop credit or a free game to people who download Flipnote Studio 3D in the first week or so? This is a plausible reward for "Flipnote Ambassadors," but not one I would recommend hoping too much for. Especially not $100.
Silver Jolteon suggests a more personal touch: a handwritten letter from the president! (...of Nintendo.) Toss in a Flipnote Frog plushie (how would they make it look pixellated?) and you've got more or less the perfect apology. I don't think anyone would hold hard feelings against Nintendo.
This response from Tom Skeys is quite hilarious. Since WE had to wait for a year, I guess it's only fair that the Japanese Flipnote fans who have been enjoying it for so long should have a turn to be locked out of using the application.
Japanese users are probably not "laughing at us." Whenever you eat a sandwich, are you "laughing" at starving orphans? No, you're just enjoying your food and that doesn't make you a bad person. Regardless, funny comment, Tom.
Yeah, Angelique! I know what you're saying. It's also easy to create a physical flip book with a stack of sticky notes.
Tom has probably the most interesting idea. And certainly a vivid imagination. I will try to get that image out of my mind now.
Well, that's all of the selected fan responses. You can see them all here.
We asked some fans on the Flipnote Studio 3D Facebook page why they liked Flipnote Studio so much. The answers surprised me: Flipnote Studio obviously means more to people than Nintendo realizes.
For many, Flipnote Studio and Hatena were a way to escape from bullying and hard times. Many people found friendship and acceptance among this community of animators.
Flipnotes are great entertainment to just watch. But when watching them, it is obvious that the creators are working with the same tools that you have available to you. This realization inspired many to work even harder on their own creations.
Flipnote Hatena was a melting pot of different people with different backgrounds, ideas, and personalities. A mishmash of fandoms, from Invader Zim, to Warrior Cats, to Doctor Who, to My Little Pony, to Sonic, to anime, each with their own groups and fans. There were adults, teenagers, and even kids.
With so many thousands of users, it's certain that many animators and artists got their start on Flipnote. The community and motivation it provided are unmatched by anything else.
The simplicity of Flipnote's tools are certainly part of its appeal. Even the "advanced tools" are pretty basic compared to more advanced software such as Toon Boom Studio and Flash. But limitation often sparks innovation, and there was a lot of that on Flipnote Hatena. One of the most amazing things to me was that people managed to create a 3D effect in their Flipnotes. You had to cross your eyes to see it, but by placing two slightly different images adjacent to each other on the screen, creators managed to engineer a basic 3D effect. Incredible. Add that to the list of unintended purposes of Flipnote Studio such as RPs and sprite animation/fonts, and you've got clear evidence of an incredibly creative community.
Everybody enjoyed drawing and animating in Flipnote Studio. Even today, when I see a DSi, I can't resist opening it and creating a silly looping animation.
And of course, like all good things, Flipnote Hatena had to end. There was hope on the horizon with the release of Flipnote Studio 3D, or so we thought. It's been almost a year since the software was delayed, with no further word regarding a release outside of Japan. It's been a pretty tough time, waiting for something that means so much to us.
Friendship. Creativity. Working to become the best.
It's no wonder Flipnotes make people feel so happy. The pure silliness and joy of seeing people's creations come to life can brighten anyone's face. The intense action of stick fights. The awesomeness of a smoothly animated original comedy. Even an entire Flipnote series with an epic story, that takes around 90 minutes to watch the whole thing. Oh, and there was always the Flipnote Frog!
As many of you likely know, and many likely do not know, Flipnote Studio is not the only DSiWare animation app out there. And since Flipnote can't be transferred to the Nintendo 3DS, and Flipnote Studio has been delayed for almost a year, this great little tool called Inchworm Animation is the only animation tool you can use on a 3DS. Is this good news, or bad news for Flipnote fans? Well, it's ultimately up to you to decide, as the application has its positives and negatives, but personally, I love Inchworm!
First off: based on drawing tools alone, Inchworm is far more powerful than the bare-bones Flipnote Studio. Sure, Flipnotes have their charm with their low resolution and limited color scheme. But in Inchworm, you can use basically unlimited colors. You can choose between a "fuzzy" (smooth) and "hard" (pixellated) brush, and set the size of the brush. You can paint with solid colors or patterns. Many patterns are included but you can create your own patterns as well. You can copy and paste selections, set your brush's transparency, and even set the size of your canvas to something much larger or smaller than the DSi screen. (Unfortunately, you can't zoom out to see the entire canvas if it is bigger than the screen.) My favorite feature is the Over-Under tool, which allows you to choose if your marks will appear above or below existing lines. This is perfect for filling in shapes, although there is also a fill bucket tool that even works decently when using fuzzy lines.
The animation tools are of equally high quality. You can hand-draw each frame, or copy and paste sections between frames. You can also have several layers animating independent of each other. For example, if you add a background to your drawing, you don't have to copy and paste it onto every frame. Instead, you can put it on its own layer with one frame. Since the new layer only has one frame, it will show that image for the entire animation. Inchworm offers an impressive variety of animation methods. Hand-drawn not your style? Inchworm offers options to use the system's cameras to record stop-motion animation, video, and time lapse video. If you so desire, you can trace each frame to create a rotoscoped animation from your video, leading to some cool results. Inchworm is not without its shortcomings, however. Inchworm doesn't allow audio, so your exports will be silent, unless you use another program to add music or audio. Also, you can't control the framerate your animation will play at. The software simply flips through the pages as fast as it can. This will make simple drawings move too fast, and complex projects appear far too slow. When you export to an SD card, you can set it to play at any frame rate you want, and that's how it will appear when you upload it to the gallery--but until then, you really don't know how it will look once finished.
Speaking of exporting and uploading, these are two of the weakest areas of the software. Because of Nintendo's requirements, you can only save to the SD card, and not read from it. Since the save space is so limited, you may end up deleting unfinished projects to make room for new ones. Once saved to the SD card, you can upload your art to the online Inchworm gallery, to be admired by the world, or so the theory goes. Inchworm's gallery avoids all the problems Hatena had by simply not including the ability to add stars, follow artists, write comments, like animations, or basically interact with anyone at all. It's nice that they included the ability to upload, but a little more functionality would be appreciated as well. My "studio": http://www.inchwormanimation.com/studio/sfz95/#3111 An amazing animator's studio: http://www.inchwormanimation.com/studio/wayne/#3045 Of course, all of these shortcomings can be excused when you realize that you can create pretty amazing animations with Inchworm Animation. If you're looking for the fun social experience Flipnote Hatena offered, you're better off using Colors! 3D or waiting for FS3D to finally leave Japan. But if you're looking for a solid, affordable animation app that you can take on the go to hone your animation skills, look no further than Inchworm Animation. Download it now! And hey, I emailed the developer, and he expressed interest in bringing a new version of Inchworm to the 3DS--this time with sound! If you want it too, let him know!
Note: This is not a problem with Inchworm itself, but it still bears mentioning. Since it is a DSiWare game, Inchworm Animation will be "stretched" to fit the higher-resolution screen if you run it on a 3DS or 3DS XL, making images appear more blurry and crappy in general. The same happens with all DS games. You can hold "start" or "select" when you open the application (or any DS game) to make it run at its original resolution, but unless you have a 3DS XL, this makes it appear extremely small.
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