The Process - Part 1

In my earlier posts I was in the middle of illustrating the WantsToBe series. These books came about from a bedtime story-telling activity with my youngest son. They were great fun to illustrate and I worked with a talented author, Valerie Harmon. More information about these books can be found at wantstobe.com. After making a Kindle and paperback version of the books I did some investigating into apps that could be created in Adobe InDesign. For the next year I glued myself to the computer and turned the WantsToBe series into 10 stand alone apps which were sold on iTunes. A year later those kind of apps were no longer supported by iTunes. Back to square one I learned how to make them into epubs which are sold in Apple Books and read in the iBooks app (included with iPads and all Apple devices).

I can remember the first of over 700 animations that I created for that series. It was for the book The Chipmunk Who Wanted to Be a Bear. The scene has the sun setting while Chipmunk tries to hibernate like a bear, but has a restless sleep with dreams of flying fish. I didn't know much about the animations panel so I made what was called an image sequence folder that was played with the tap of a button. I used image sequences for most of my animations in those early apps. I had the biggest thrill at seeing my illustration come to life for the first time when I played it in the previewer. Now I rarely do image sequences if I can help it because setting them up takes a-lot more time and they aren't as smooth.

I create the image sequences in Adobe Illustrator in my artwork file. I duplicated the sun and moved it slightly down the art board, then repeated the process 10 times. I exported them as pngs and cropped them to the desired size in Adobe Photoshop. Since image sequence folders aren't used in epubs, I now place them in my InDesign file and make them into a multi-state object. The button action is set to go to the next state (10x), the timing is adjusted, and the sun sets! I will try to not bore you with the details but if you don't know how to do something, just Google it! After seeing the sun set I was hooked! I can't upload a video of this animation here but you can check out other animations on my facebook page.