How To Create Animation On A Mac Or PC

Your Mac comes with a bunch of built-in tools which accomplish all sorts of tasks for most users. Browser. Email. Music. Photos. Movies. Web sites. Add iWork and a Mac is a fully loaded 21st century computing beast ready for word processing, spreadsheet crunching, professional presentations.

What about graphics? What about animation? For that, Mac users will need to cough up some serious coin, take classes, and gain experience. Or, try something free that helps create animated graphics, perfect for fun, for web sites, or inexpensive experience.

Animate Expensive

There’s no shortage of quality animation applications for Mac users with money.

By no means is this a definitive list, but 2D and 3D animation is alive and well on the Mac. Go pro with Toon Boom Studio and create a full-fledged animated cartoon series.

Or, go for broke with Toon Boom’s Animate and create a whole animated movie from beginning to end.

For a lot less money there’s PulpMotion Advanced which does animation of sorts and works with photos, images, and more.

Venture into 3 dimensional animation and rendering with Lightwave 3D. Most of those tools require a lot of time and effort to master. Oh, and a second mortgage while you learn. Prices range up to $1,000.

Animate Cheap

You get the picture, right? Animation can be complex and expensive. It can also be, well, not so expensive. As in free.

That’s what Gifted Motion is about. Animation. Free.

There are two basic caveats to using Gifted Motion on your Mac (or Windows PC, or Linux PC), both of which are overshadowed by what you can do without a degree in media arts and thousands invested in high end software or the complexities of Adobe’s Flash.

Gifted Motion creates GIF animations. GIF. As in graphics interchange format. As in ancient web animation technology that still works pretty much everywhere.

It Just Works. Simply

Back in the early days of the web the two main graphic formats were JPEG and GIF. JPEG for photos, GIF for images. And animation.

Fire up Gifted Motion on your Mac. Create an image using the built-in tools. Expand the image, animation style—frame by frame—and begin animating. The learning curve? There really isn’t one. GM is that easy.

Create a frame, adjust the graphic, create another frame, adjust the graphic, repeat and rinse. That begins the animation process. GIF files work in any modern browser, and the animations are good for web sites, greeting cards, email, even small cartoons.

Gifted Motion runs on Macs and PCs. Oh, the second caveat? It’s Java. Like it or hate it. It works. And it’s free. What’s not to like?