{"id":993,"date":"2020-06-06T15:36:13","date_gmt":"2020-06-06T19:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blindemanwebsites.com\/today-i-learned\/?p=993"},"modified":"2020-10-22T13:02:45","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T17:02:45","slug":"free-software-for-animation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blindemanwebsites.com\/today-i-learned\/2020\/free-software-for-animation\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Software for Animation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Once a year I teach Animation & Interaction at MKstart<\/a> in Amsterdam. When I started teaching this class over 10 years ago, I used Flash. I’d make some very tiny animations with them during the first few classes and then some mini games during the last few classes. I loved it, they loved it, it was great. When Flash died, eventually I switched to Animate. The brush tool is still the same, the regular crashes are the same, but working in Canvas has made Animate more buggy and unreliable. I haven’t found any good alternatives so I use it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The students are not expected to have the software themselves. They use the school laptops during class. This year, because Corona, I was in New York, my students were at home–without school laptops…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students do not have a lot of money, they do not have very fancy computers and the school doesn’t have enough money to fix those problems. The first thing I decided was to focus on one of the two subjects. The second thing was that it would be animation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I made a website for them where they would be able to find all the classes online with examples and were they could upload what they’d made if they wanted to. I also added a list of free software that might come in handy and instead of just copying and pasting from everyone else’s lists of free software, I tried all of them to see if they would work for my class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What did I look for?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n