I was thinking about my plants back home and realized that I haven’t had the time to take care of them as well as I should. I then started thinking about different companies that are associated with plants. I created a company called Simple Bloom that allows individuals to grow their own plants. They provide seeds, educational videos, and clear instructions on how to take care of them. I wanted a simple background, prominent text and a simple illustration of a plant growing.
Before entering this program, I used to use ProCreate for my own drawings. It’s capable of making gifs and sharing mp4s. I prefer drawing with a pencil or a pen and an iPad gives me that opportunity.
I had some difficulty with ProCreate as a program for animation. It was easier to animate using a pencil tool and drawing straight on an iPad, but I had to preset my layers prior to starting the animation. The problem with presetting layers is that you can’t add more layers if you require more than the maximum listed. I also created the poster background prior to creating the animation and I didn’t find out until later that I needed to merge both the poster and the animated layer together with each layer.
In order to solve the first issue of not having enough layers, I just created as many layers as I could and slowed down the transition of the mp4. I solved the second issue by duplicating the background image for each animated layer and merged the drawn layer and the background image together. So each generated transition had a background and a foreground of the animation.
My iPad unfortunately loses battery fairly quickly, so I’m glad that it didn’t take too long to create the animation. Usually, if I’m working on my iPad for too long it dies and it’s a hassle but I’m glad that no problems arose. I finished the animation, published it, and had fun creating it.