The results of last week's poll surprised me; at the time of this post, a full third of you plan to use the iPad to create graphics for computer animation, despite any limitations inherent in the software and capacity of the device. Now I'm entirely curious; how do you plan to use the iPad? Share your answers here, and join in the discussion.

Neeci writes:

"hi i just saw avatar (Adri note: who hasn't?) and its so cool how the pictures do that they jump out of the screen with the 3d glasses is that somethin animation can do its so cool"

Well...yes and no. 3D effects can work with both live-action and 3D movies, as you probably saw in Avatar, which mixes live-action and CGI. When you watch a 3D movie, you're actually watching two separate movies that have tricked your eyes into thinking it's one movie with three-dimensional images.

Many of you know that I'm not just a freelance animator; I'm also a freelance writer, and in a writing workshop I attended last weekend we were discussing the writing habits of planners vs. pantsers: people who outline their stories before writing, versus people who dive in and figure out what happens as they go. Planning vs. pantsing can also apply to animation, but because of the nature of animation pantsing just doesn't work quite as well. You might be able to pants it as far as which scene comes next, but when it comes to individual scenes you really need to use tools like storyboarding to plan out your sequences of animation.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Apple announced the advent of the iPad on the 27th: a multifunction tablet device targeting portability and ease of use in both creating and experiencing multimedia content. The Apple content model has already proposed to change multiple online markets (with the Amazon/MacMillan dustup over e-book pricing only the first in many expected shakeups); how do you think the iPad will affect us as animators? Will it become a useful tool for us as well, or just another shiny toy?