Flipghost
About

Why we built a flipbook in a browser

Animation software has spent thirty years getting more powerful and less inviting. Flipghost is a small argument that the fastest way to learn to animate is still to draw one frame, then draw the next one.

The long version

Every animation tool worth using is now aimed at someone who already knows how to animate. They are extraordinary at what they do, and they all ask the same thing first: install this, learn this, decide what kind of project this is, and then, eventually, draw. The gap between wanting to animate and animating has quietly become the hardest part of animating.

A flipbook has no such gap. You draw a thing, you draw it again slightly moved, and it lives. That is the entire mechanism, and it has not needed improving since 1868. What it has needed is somewhere to live that does not require a licence key, and a way to see the frame before the one you are on.

So Flipghost is deliberately small. A canvas, a timeline, onion skinning, and an exporter. Every feature past those four has to survive the same question: does this help someone finish a loop today, or does it help someone imagine finishing one? We have said no to a lot of good ideas on that basis, and the tool is better for it.

It is built by a small team that draws, which mostly means every feature gets used in anger before it ships, and the ones that annoy us do not survive the week.

What we hold to

  • Frame by frame, on purpose

    The oldest way to animate and still the most direct. Nothing sits between the drawing and the motion, so nothing can flatter a drawing that is not working yet.

  • A URL is the whole install

    No licence server, no forty minute setup before the first line. If you have a browser and a spare ten minutes, you have everything you need to start.

  • Your work stays yours

    No watermark on your frames, no holding exports hostage behind a plan. The export you get is the animation you drew.

  • The ghost is the point

    Onion skinning is the heart of the tool, and an onion skin is a ghost of the frame before. The name picked itself.

That is the summary. The workshop is the actual argument, and it takes about ten minutes to find out whether we are right.