Pans and zooms are essential to artistic film making.

Pans

Pans let you show your character’s movement, like following Jupiter Dog while the background pans as he walks down the road. But there’s a lot more to panning than just panning the background. You can also use a pan to show any object moving across the screen. And you can pan up and down to show a rocket ship taking off or a snowball coming down. And in FlipBook it’s really easy to do. You just put the object where you want it to be in the beginning frame and then go to the ending frame and put it where you want it to be then. FlipBook will calculate all the positions of the object in all the between frames and move it for you as the scene plays.

Zoom

Zooms let you draw the viewer’s attention into the scene and directly to the subject of the story. They keep you from getting distracted by the rest of the frame while something is happening in just one part. You can start with a wide shot of a city street and zoom in on a single store. Or at the end of a scene you can zoom out to give the viewer a broader perspective. And doing a zoom is just like doing a pan but instead of change left, right, up or down, you just change the size of the object. So go to the first frame and set the object’s size. Then go to the last frame of the zoom and set the object’s size. FlipBook does the rest.

Rotate

Rotating the whole scene is a great way to attract the viewer’s attention because it’s something we don’t usually see in real life. Or you can rotate anything in the scene. It could be the hands of a clock or a street light falling over. This saves you from having trouble draw it again and again in every little angle. And again rotation is really easy. Go the first frame of the rotation and set the position of the object. Then go to the last frame of the move and rotate it to its new position. FlipBook does the rest. It can even rotate things again and again. So with a pan and a rotation you could show a ball rolling down the street with just one drawing.

But FlipBook doesn’t stop at just pan, zoom and rotate. You can also Blur and Dissolve (fade).

Blur

Blurring reproduces a camera’s limited depth of field. Phone camera’s have recently made a big deal out of blurring the background to focus your attention on the foreground. Or you may want to “unblur” as a way of easing into a scene starts or blur your way out as it ends.

Dissolve (fade)

Dissolves are when things fade in and out. They’re usually used as a transition to go smoothly from one scene to the next where one scenes fades out as another fades in. But they can also be used to made things fade away or gradually appear. Ghosts could gradually come and go. But Dissolves can also be used to do some pretty fancy stuff. Image a scene with a daytime palette on one layer and a nighttime palette on another. A cross dissolve, where the layer with the daytime palette fades away leaving the layer with the nighttime would show a gradual passing of time.

Now image a scene with a bright yellow sun high in the sky using a pan to make the sun set, a zoom to make it a little smaller as it goes toward the horizon, you could even add a slight rotation to put a little curve on the path of the sun as it sets and then you add a cross-dissolve to make the sun gradually turn orange before it drops out of view. Yep – FlipBook can do all that.