This technique seemed so cool — almost like a magic trick! — that I had to try it. First, I made a fun layered design in Procreate. The environment was inspired by old-school side-scrolling Mario games.

Then, I uploaded the layers as PNGs into Swift Playgrounds and followed Jarom Vogel’s tutorial. I was familiar with coding/naming conventions but not an expert, so it helped to have some guidance.

Since the animation timeline had an eight-frame limit, I decided to have the dog simply leap, flip up the basketball and leap back to the original platform.

Once the illustration was up and animating, I tested it out by displaying the background on my phone and then screen-recorded the output on my iPad. It was such a cool moment to see my digital animation pop up as if it were a real thing in 3D space!