Create hand-drawn GIFs on paper | Hacker News Reader

Create hand-drawn GIFs on paper

eatmy.art

375 pointstrueduke39 comments

I think this is really cute and wonderful. I think there's some room to improve here, e.g. an AR ghost overlay of previous frames as well as ML extracted frames from pure paper without having to print a template (both of which I believe are feasible). But overall I love that people are experimenting with this stuff (and wouldn't want to react negatively here in any way to discourage this type of work).

Some might argue moving from digital to pen and paper is a step down but I'd argue the opposite. I'd love and look forward to a possible future where we move digital advancements into the analog world in this way. As Theil says you can barely tell the difference between this world and the 80s if you remove cell phones and computers, but things like this are a cool way to hopefully get us closer to computers aiding more natural forms of interaction.

I love this project! I agree support for arbitrary grids would add a lot to the user experience. You might not even need ml for that. For instance, look for the blob of uninterrupted color that occupies the largest contiguous space in the image and interpret cell order within it by a function of their midpoint and filter for size. You could draw missing outside walls via convex hull generation first.

This is really, really cool! The kids are going to love this!

I'm no artist, but it is super easy! - https://imgur.com/a/hbCSkiY

Only thing is that the image didn't seem to work taking a photo directly on my phone - had to move it to the computer to upload

This was truly amazing, I hope the add more templates for the non-artistically inclined. The fact that even I could do something like this is amazing!

https://imgur.com/a/Up4vaXn

Nice work. It inspired me to interrupt work and create this

https://imgur.com/a/MBIx7jJ

I like it a lot. Having the bulb stay alight makes me think ....

I like the simplicity, but it seems rather difficult to draw an animation without an ability to overlay the frames.

Perhaps that could be solved by some kind of folded template? Or a multi-page template that can be arranged and scanned in one go in the end?

I have to say though, the ability to paint a separate background and foreground and choose the frame rate in the template already is pretty cool!

There appear to be thinly drawn grids in each cell to help alignment?

You could print on Vellum, its slightly transparent and great for transferring. I think thats what they used back in the day too

You can a get cheap portable light table. I have a Huion one I use for making papercraft greeting cards (I sketch the shapes before transferring to colored paper via tracing).

This would be a really cool integration with Paper Website

https://paperwebsite.com

And Field Papers

http://www.fieldpapers.org

I thought this was going to be instructions on how to make a flipbook animation, for the kids that are more familiar with GIFs than those.

Yeah, the submitted title is not good at conveying what this actually is.

I cant scroll the webpage on iphone

Same. Reader mode to the rescue!

Update: darn it ain’t work

Yes, it kept springing back, but eventually it worked

I don't know what they've done, but eventually it unsticks if you just keep swiping. Then it gets stuck again, then it scrolls again. It's navigable, given sufficient patience and effort.

https://brush.ninja/ is fast and nice if you just want to do quick stick figure type animated gifs. Start by drawing something simple in the current frame, then down at the bottom, use the "duplicate" to make the next frame and add some changes, then rinse/repeat.

No forced sign up, ads, etc.

Reminds me of Flipnote Studio on the Nintendo DS. Had a large active community with a lot of creativity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipnote_Studio

I am sure this will get used in a similar way. I’d be interested to see a platform like deviantart, join forces with a new form factor like this.

Very neat idea, definitely going to try making few gifs myself :)

Just found a minor issue, when we click on any image on templates page, it gives a "Not found" error. May be you can link the image to PDF so that user can click on image to open the pdf.

This is how I taught my son to do these, but just wrote a simple script using the ImageMagick library and regular grid paper.

It's definitely not a huge technical wonder, but I swear he made hundreds of them.

How did you do the alignment?

I've seen various tools that let you take a picture and that then automatically align the paper to scan it (sometimes with and sometimes without QR codes in the corners) and I wish there was some general "how to" tutorial out there for that kind of trick

A long time ago I did something like this with ImageMagick using what it called "Extract SIFT Correspondences". I don't know if that still exists, but the homography feature in OpenCV looks like the same idea: https://learnopencv.com/image-alignment-feature-based-using-...

That's not what I used but yeah similar process

Really nice combination of digital and analogue. I wish more websites were more 'hand-drawn'

Amazing! I'll try it with my kids. :)

Suggestion: create an app so we can see the results immediately.

Works very nicely - my stick man was able to score a goal and celebrate! Firefox + Android

Oh man, I love this!! I'm gonna send to my girlfriend who's an Art Teacher.

Wow! My kids will love it! I'll have them try this out on the weekend.

This is awesome! Will be sharing this with friends with kids.

This is really neat! Nice one OP!

This is fun

It's like taking something that's decades old, trying to make it look fresh. One can do this easily in paint.net using the animated gif plugin, without being required to draw into a grid and without requiring an internet connection to be productive.

The actually good part is the domain name.

Wow - did you miss the part that it is using a pencil/pen and paper? Not a graphics tablet, or a mouse, but drawn by hand and then converted to a gif?

I think it's pretty cool that you could print out a template, draw/paint/scribble some bits, take a photo, then have an animated gif!

Exactly. Might turn out great for kids as a first initiation to animation, will definitely try with my daughter!

> and without requiring an internet connection to be productive.

Then who would you show off your animated gifs to?

I think you've completely missed the point of this app in a somewhat exceedingly miserable and uncharitable way.

I agree that this is arguably more about "wow, it's cool and maybe more fun to draw on paper" than "this is actually the easiest way to draw animations in 2022 for most kids".

Most kids have access to a phone/tablet and would probably do better with something like this?

https://animatic.io/

Then again i guess it's easier to draw with pens, pencils, markers, crayons than it is to draw on a phone/tablet.

But yea, it's super cool to do it on paper too. I'd be nice to make the site mobile friendly. Of course this requires access to a printer. I haven't owned a printer in 9 years :( Maybe the next version could use ML or something to let you hand draw the grid.

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