Animation and Video Life

GoAnimate recently went through some major upgrades that has given more users access to uploading flash animated props. Unfortunately if you're not able to purchase Adobe CS5 or even the cheaper flash animation alternatives like Koolmoves there isn't a lot of great free flash animation software out there. In fact Pencil Animator , which I've reviewed before , is pretty much it. Whilst it may not have all the bells and whistles of even the lower end commercial flash software products, is quite buggy and prone to crashing, it's still pretty powerful. In fact it can hold its own with the quality of the flash it produces when in capable hands. Considering Pencil Animator is quite easy to learn, it's own manual leaves a lot to be desired, making the program seem more complex than necessary. If you just want to know enough to make great props and backgrounds for your GoAnimate animations then this is where I come in. The animation below demonstrates an animated ca...

In a some what futile effort to get my partner, Enigma, interested in GoAnimate I created a GoAnimate Custom Character based on her Facebook profile avatar. That's her avatar image on the right and in the image below is Enigma Sunshine, the character - whom was also named by my partner. The character is actually meant to have green eyes, as in the avatar picture, but for some reason in the final animation the pupils show up black. My partner spends a lot of time on Facebook so it's not hard to see where the inspiration for Engima Sunshine being a Facebook 'socialite' comes from. I'm not a big fan of online social networks myself. I'd call myself a 'reluctant' participant. Particularly when it comes to real time chat. I prefer the old style message board forums to live chat (or even Twitter for that matter). I found coming up with a script for the first episode of Enigma Sunshine fairly difficult as result. In fact, to try and find some inspiration...