Concept development tool AND presentation design?
I've had f-a-c for a few years now and it's become a big part of my daily workflow.
Am I an animator? Nope. Exploring animation? Not really.
What I use f-a-c for is something it wasn't really designed for: as a 'pocket' concept/presentation/storyboard development tool.
I love it because it gives me a great little set of natural drawing tools and a way to create and manage 'slides' (frames) very quickly and intuitively.
The latest edition of the Text tool has gone a long way to make me thinking it would be awesome if there were just a couple more tools to make this a bonafide presentation editor.
But I don't want to suggest that we need to get away from the great basic ease of use and well-thought out set of features that are already in f-a-c. With the exception of maybe one optional tool, most of my ideas have nothing to do with the main drawing/editing window.
So what are they?
ONE: a way to set the pause time for each slide [frame] for playback. You have this in gif animation editors, and I wonder how hard it would be to implement here. For me, I could see doing this in the frame sorter, in its long-press pop-up. A little slider bar, number input line? This value would be read by the playback function and (hopefully) in the next idea: a presentation export file option.
TWO: Export all (or selected?) frames as slides [pages] in a PDF presentation file. Maybe include page transition choices? I know many would prefer PowerPoint export, but for me, PDF is the most flexible cross-platform solution.
THREE: Type as editable special 'Text layers'? I'm sure that I'm not the only one to ask for that, but I could see it being big for presentation work.
The thing is, the power of f-a-c in a presentation context is its hand-drawn look. This is a powerful tool for psychological reasons. Hand-drawn slides add a degree of honest, fresh authenticity and wider scope to what can be addressed. It's more engaging! Flip-a-clip has the power to make that kind of process easily accessible on pen-enabled devices. So that's my pitch for making and possibly promoting the product as something more creatives can use outside of the animation crowd: a great way to flesh out and even present idea development.
Anyone else feeling or using f-a-c in this way?
Thanks for your feedback about how you use FlipaClip. This does help us understand how some users use the app. The focus of the app is not really a presentation type of app but I do see why it can be very useful for this.
Thanks for your feedback again and it's really funny you call it f-a-c... :P