Creating animations may be considered as a hectic and complicated process if you are using the conventional products for creating animations. Animations involves creating of images, preparing them for the stage, creating the animation frame by frame and lots of more stuffs to do.

But recently I have been introduced to an innovative technology that does these above jobs with some simple clicks. Yes you read that right, you can create animations with just a few clicks on your mouse and creativity.

Guys at Accelerated I/O have created an awesome tool called Pac-n-Zoom, with which one can create animations easily right from their web browser without having to go through the tedious job of conventional animation or without having a vast knowledge of animation. In this article I will discuss about this technology and how it can be helpful for animators as well as non-animators to create animations while saving a lot of time too.

How does this Work?

Now that I have mentioned about the technology you might be wondering that how does this technology actually works. Well to be true, when I first saw this technology I had the same question in mind, so without wasting time, let us jump into the working principle of this advanced technology.

The heart of this technology is the SVG image format also known as the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which allows the user to have greater interactivity with a picture as compared to other popular image formats like JPG or PNG. Now what does this “better interactivity” means, images are just for viewing, how can they interact? If this question is on your mind right now, be sure to overwrite that concept that images are static, and they can’t be played with. For better understanding, let us have a look at the following picture.

As you can see clearly in the above picture that in SVG format, the objects have better clarity and details, so that they can be played with or rather interacted with, while in other formats like JPG or PNG you won’t see this. Right now SVG is the format that allows these kind of interactivity like you can separate a piece from the image, and control it, create animations and save it to another SVG format animated image.
So, no matter which format of image you are using for the animations, you first need to convert this into SVG. And the great thing about this tool is that you won’t even need to use a third party tool to convert your existing JPG or PNG image to SVG, as this tool has the capability to convert images to SVG format, so it’s a piece of cake.

What kind of Animations can it Produce?

With this new tool, you can produce a variety of 2D animations, as far as your creativity takes you. And like I said creating animations is really very easy, you just need to think of what you want to produce, and then use this simple and powerful tool to convert your imagination into real animations.

This tool also uses the concept of frame by frame animations, but its a somewhat different from the conventional way. Here you need to work only on a short number of frames, and you can record animations by moving your objects with your mouse while the animations path gets recorded and it will be applied to your animation.

An example of animations can be created using this tool are illustrated below,

You can see in the above image that the starting and ending scenes of the animation are shown, as its a JPG format image, but you can view the real animation in the SVG format animated image here.

As you can see, you can basic yet very interesting animations with this tool that can be shared on your websites, as well as with your friends, as animated images speaks a lot more than static images. Talking about “speaking more” you can also create your greeting cards with this tool, and send it to your dear ones, and since you have created it, it will be unique and much better than the ready made cards available.

Well, in this Christmas, I am going to make full use of this tool to create unique animated cards and send them to my friends, I recommend you do the same, and you won’t believe but this is really really very easy to use.

How to Use Pac-n-Zoom?

Pac-n-zoom is very easy to use, all you need to do is just upload your photos which you want to be animated, convert them to SVG if they are not in SVG format, and use the animation tools to create great animations with those images.

The user interface is extremely easy to use and everyone can do it, without having vast knowledge, because its like a webpage, just with some advanced features.
For adding objects for animation, you can simply open up an image, crop the desired section, save it as SVG, and add it to the scene and it can be modified with just a click.

To see Pac-n-Zoom in action, you can watch these two videos supplied by Accelerated I/O, which clearly shows how to use this tool to create simple yet awesome animations in a very short time,

Now that you have seen how this tool works and how to use it, it’s time for you to experience it and apply your creative mind to create wonderful animated photos with it.

What is the Cost of using Pac-n-Zoom?

The cost of using Pac -n-Zoom tool is extremely low. You can create unlimited animations for free, the only thing for which you need to pay is saving and converting SVG format images. You will need to pay about only 1 penny for a 100×100 px image.

As seen, an average user requires to spend only about $5 per 6 months for creating wonderful animations online. Now this is really cheap for all those goodies that you are getting with this tool.

This brings me to the end of the article, and I hope you have enjoyed reading this article and learning about this new technology that has been developed by Accelerated I/O. So I assume now you are ready to create some serious online animations, do share these animations with us, just post a link with your comment below.