Animation and Video Life

GoAnimate isn't the only service that has noticed business presentation animations can be expensive and difficult to make without user friendly tools like GoAnimate's Studio. PowToon is a new online business presentation and animation service that almost anyone should be able to use. The service is still in beta test at the moment and, not being a beta tester myself, I haven't had the opportunity to try it out so this article is what I've learnt from their promotional video embeded below. The PowToon studio is kind of like Power Point with a lot more features and a library of pre-made animations. You create your presentation as a series of pages which you simply drag and drop your content to from the PowToon component library. That's about as much as I know for the moment. It's got some interesting components like writing hands making it easy to create whiteboard style animations. The demonstration animations I've seen thus far are as go...

The Morevna Project is an ambitious undertaking to create a feature length, anime style, animation using only Open Source i.e. freeware software. Begun sometime in 2008, the project's blog is a fascinating insight into the development of an animation that began as an idea and continues with perseverance and little to no funding. Currently the project's Russian creators, Konstantin Dmitriev and Nikolay Mamashev, are trying to raise some funds so their lead animator (Nikolay) can work full time for the next two months in a big push to get their demo finished by the end of 2012. Their video below, in Russian with English subtitles, explaining their need for funding is also a great overview of the project and gives a step by step look at how an animation goes from idea to finished movie. Not only is the project inspirational because it uses freely available animation software like Synfig (2D), Pencil (2D) and Blender (3D) but also you can access many of the...

Synfig Studio is intended to be professional 2D animation software and is available to download for free. It has been around for quite some time now and seems to have had a fairly checkered history in terms of development, as noted in TildeHash's blog last year, Potential for Free Animation Software dead?  Not overly surprising for free, open source software. However the program keeps getting updated with release 0.63.05 being made available on the 9th April 2012. There are versions available for Mac, Windows and Linux. I've had previous versions of Synfig installed on my computer for some time and, I'm going to confess, I've never used it. So, even though I've just installed the latest version, don't expect a review. The reason being, I fire this software up and it just looks like hard work to learn. Which is not the same as being hard to learn. It's just going to take quite some time and quite a few tutorials to get myself up to speed to the point...

Xtranormal's online studio is a good way to take a break from the challenges of visualizing a complete script to just focus on a single scene with dialogue. So that's what I do from time to time. The Robotz theme characters are actually a collection of retro constructed robots made from hardware that seems to be mostly pre-1980 back to very early twentieth century. In this sketch the very latest in World Domination Robots reports for duty in some large industrial type complex of the future (I think the set is actually the bridge of a space craft). It's not long before he realizes he's not as impressive as he first thought. The idea for this sketch is really just me messing about. I like the idea of contrasting grand ideas with the intricacies of every day life. Who really cares if you're the latest in World Domination Robots if it's peace time and you have a broken toaster? Although Xtranormal looks deceptively easy there's actually more wo...