http://goanimate.com/
Attending Full Sail, I had actually heard of Go!Animate floating around the discussion boards. I then saw a student use it to complete one of our assignments. I found the concept of having a novice create his or her own cartoons very appealing. I could see it being used to demonstrate short points or perhaps as an introduction to more content.
When I started poking around, I noticed the free section had a good number of options. Many of the costumes and set designs were Halloween themed. I then began creating my first character, which, like God, was to be made in my own image. Except God didn’t have to deal with presets. I found the choices for body parts and clothing quite diverse, although all the cool stuff cost money. These items are purchased with the in-game currency, “go-bucks”. I thought, let’s really see this thing operate, so I coughed up the $18 dollars for the 3-month premium membership. This money gave me a nice allowance with which I could create characters, modify them, etc. Unfortunately, my Avatar ended up costing me practically half of my allowance. I guess that is the cost of beauty in this game, eh?
So, with my one, expensive character, I set out to design my cartoon. The set designs were numerous and varied. There were also many stock characters to choose from (luckily for free). The animation process uses Flash as its GUI, which makes complex operations a little tedious as you have to click on specific buttons to invoke the appropriate actions. However, after getting through the 1-hour learning curve, my creativity was able to come forward. I found the process a little tedious, as animation should be, but I found it quite rewarding to see the outcome. There is a text-to-speech feature which produces humorous-though-not-quite-as-intended outcomes. The variety of voices and accents was enough to differentiate characters. There is an upload feature where you can import your own voices, Flash animations, characters, etc. However, there comes a point when I start feeling like someone should be PAYING ME, for generating all this content.
There is a social feature which conveniently connects to your Gmail, Facebook, or Yahoo accounts. The game also rewards you for sharing your content with other people in the form of Experience Points. Apparently, my profile can actually gain levels, but I’m not quite sure what that does entirely.
Finally, when you are done with your animation (after a considerable amount of hours has quickly passed by), you can publish and download to HD. This file you can upload to YouTube, but it does take quite a while for your movie to publish, so don’t try doing so in a pinch for time. By the way, the HD download costs another 100 GoBucks. Which means I only have enough now to download 1 more HD movie and to perhaps gave my Avatar some designer jeans or something. So just like its Hollywood counterpart, GoAnimate! Puts top talent and content at a premium, leaving us would-be animators to be forever stuck with our B-Movie cartoons. That’s alright. B-movies are more fun to make, than to watch anyway!
FYI: The cartoon above is to be used as in introduction to a formal lecture on how students should integrate their in-text citations for their Research Papers.
