Goanimate is my Web 2.0 tool review for the week. Goanimate lets people create short animated films and publish them on the internet. The online software is easy to learn and quite simple to use. The cartoon characters can be made to perform a wide variety of actions including emotion and body reaction. Users create a bank of characters to add in and out of your cartoon, as you like. Your avatar can be made to look like anybody or any thing you want. You can type what you want your character to say or you can even record your voice through your telephone and upload it directly into the software. Then you create different scenes through a wide variety of backdrops. The scenes can be 2 min. in length with the free version of Goanimate or you can invest in an upgrade with more scenes and many more options, but this cost money. Once your animated shorts are created you can upload to the goanimate extensive collection of user-created features. Here you share your features with groups or make your cartoons public. Facebook and twitter are also supported.
This is just my opinion but is seems like there would be a very narrow window of people that would use this Web 2.0 tool. Young children may not understand the software and older teens and adults may be to mature to enjoy the finished products. But for a narrow group of young teens this might be a great way of introducing on line sharing along with cartoon creation.
I would like to try using Goanimate for storyboarding during the planning stages of video productions.
This software is one that I would enjoy in my classroom as well. I truly believe that it would be an effective tool for storyboarding, so that the students really can understand the importance of sequence order and shot composition. I can appreciate any tool that will help them become more effective. I disagree that the audience would be limited, young children have been groomed in this technology age, and I think that they would catch on faster than we think. Moreover the older audience should embrace it because it is a break from the norm. But at any rate thanks for introducing it and I think its awesome...
ReplyDeleteI also disagree with the assumption that because of the look of the cartoon aspects of the ease of use that any age group wouldn't like the program. I agree that Go! Animate look like a good start for storyboarding. But I also see it as a preproduction video. Or as Shana stated a break from the norm or tradition. Ease of use doesn't always have to apply to limitations; it could also mean effective too.
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