Flipnote Studio Is Out! (And It's Free!)

One of the DS titles that intrigued me at E3 was the announcement of Flipnote Studio as a downloadable title for the DSi. I even got a chance to get my hands on it at the Nintendo booth, and it just increased my enthusiasm for it. So imagine my surprise to discover that not only has Flipnote Studio just been released for download from the Nintendo DSi Shop, but it doesn't even cost anything! That part, I didn't know!

Basically, Flipnote Studio turns your DSi into a flipbook. You can draw on the touch screen, and then flip to the next page to draw the next frame of animation. There's a greyed-out image of the previous frame to use as reference, which is fantastically helpful. You can use the built-in microphone to add sounds to your animated masterpiece or use sounds you've previously recorded as part of the DSi's sound application. You can also import photos from your DSi Camera album as black and white images and work from there.

"Flipnote Studio takes the phenomenon of user-generated content to new levels of creative self-expression and social sharing - with all the fun and accessibility that consumers expect from Nintendo," said Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America's executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. "The animation possibilities are limited only by users' imaginations."

The demo unit at E3 had a rather spectacular piece of animation that I had thought was made using the DSi camera, but I was informed that it wasn't real stop motion — someone had instead actually used the textured paintbrush tools to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth to the objects they'd drawn. It was very impressive. My animations will probably never reach those heights, but I'm super-excited to try it out. You can save your creations to an SD card, or share them wirelessly with friends with a DSi. But the best way to share is to upload them to the Hatena website where there are thousands of Flipnotes already uploaded. Right now it's mostly Japanese, but you can see just how impressive some of them are, even if you can't understand the language! I've embedded one at the top of this article so you can see just what's possible. And since Flipnote Studio is a free application, there's really no reason not to at least give it a shot and show us what you've got!