Simple Motion

Draw a frame. Draw the next one. Press play.

Simple Motion is a hand-drawn animation studio for iPad and iPhone, built
around the way animation is actually taught — a stack of drawings, a timeline,
and an onion skin to keep it all moving. Everything a student needs is one tap
away, and everything they don't need stays out of the way.

**Draw with Apple Pencil, the way it should feel**

Ink is pure PencilKit, so it's as fast and as natural as writing on paper, pressure, tilt, double-tap, the lot. Pinch to zoom, twist to rotate the canvas to a comfortable angle, and tap four fingers to hide every tool and see only your drawing.
Shape recognition turns a wobbly circle into a clean one when you hold still at the end of a stroke, and the paint fill tool floods an outline in a single tap.

**See your animation move while you draw it**

Onion skin ghosts the frames either side in red and blue, with independent counts for before and after. Flip and roll through neighbouring frames to check
your motion — the fundamental animator's flick, now a button. Playback runs at your project's frame rate with a scrubbable playhead, custom in and out points,
and looped ranges.

**A timeline that works like a real dope sheet**

Pinch the timeline to zoom through five sizes; past the middle rung every cell shows a thumbnail of the drawing on it. Hold a drawing across frames, build cycles and ping-pongs from a range, drag frames to reorder them, copy and paste between layers and projects, and use select mode to act on a batch at once.
Named, coloured markers keep track of beats and dialogue.

**Layers for every kind of animation**

Eight layer types: Drawing, Stop Motion, Image, Video, Audio, Guide, Adjustment and Annotation. Shoot claymation with the built-in stop-motion camera and its ghost alignment overlay. Rotoscope over an imported video, sampled on ones, twos or threes. Add a soundtrack and trim, cut and slide it against the picture. Drop in a Guide layer for motion arcs and timing charts that appear over everything and never export. Reorder, hide, lock, merge, duplicate, and set opacity or blend modes per layer.

**Colour, assets and references, always to hand**

A floating colour palette you can drop anywhere on screen, with a proper picker, an eyedropper with a magnifier, and your five most recent colours one tap away. Build a library of reusable drawings — mouth shapes for lip-sync, a set of hands, a logo — stored with the project and stamped onto the canvas as real, editable ink. Move a whole library between projects as a single file.
Pin a reference photo or video in a floating panel, zoom into a detail, and pick colours straight off it.

**Made for a classroom**

Organise the gallery into folders by class or assignment, search across all of them at once, and sort by name or by what was opened last. Save any project as a template, hand it out, and every student who taps it starts a fresh copy with the canvas size, frame rate and guide layers already set