A Go!Animate Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! This would be a post about the animatic for the film… BUT my scanner and my computer have decided that they want to be fussy and don’t want to talk to one another here lately. So I decided to take a little break from the film for the holidays and work on getting those two back together again (that would be the Christmas miracle...  pray that I don't need a new scanner!). I did want to take the opportunity to talk about Go!Animate, the website that I’ve been using to create the little cartoons I’ve been making with my nephews.


Go!Animate is a website where, as their tagline reads, “anyone can animate”. I discovered this site after Go!Animate followed me on Twitter. They have created a unique platform where you can create a simple Flash cartoon with pre-animated characters and preloaded backgrounds, sounds and special effects, even camera moves. They have licensed characters from various properties including Street Fighter, Star Trek and even Akon (the rapper!) and they also have a custom character creator. They have a very clean and simple interface for their animator program. You drag and drop your elements onto the “Stage” and adjust the length of time your elements appear. You add another Scene to make a change. You can import your own sound and images. You can also sync sound and music to the elements. The site has a community of GoAnimators that regularly chat on the forums and there is a Facebook Chat like feature so you can instant message other GoAnimators. You can even easily share your creations on the various social media portals.


At first glance, a professional would call it “cheating” or “lazy”(and they have, I asked.) The program gives you a very small level of control and the controls you do have are imprecise and clumsy, especially to sync your sounds and music. The pre-animated characters have limits on what they can do, thus limiting what you can do and the story (if any) you can tell. You need Firefox or Google Chrome to run the site without it crashing or locking up. If you have ever felt that you had to fight Flash to get the results you want, you feel that in spades here. Granted, this is a new site and they are still working out the bugs. So, why would someone like me even bother with a website like this? Several reasons.


This is the perfect platform to teach kids how to animate and I saw a tweet where Go!Animate is creating a special educational version. I’ve been using it to teach my nephew Jamari about some of the basics of animation. Yes, the characters are pre-animated… but to create something of quality you still need the basics of story, staging, pacing, etc. Jamari is seeing these basics and understanding them with this platform because he can see the results instantly and apply them himself to his own cartoons. Once he learns to draw and is ready to take intro to animation courses or learn Flash or ToonBoom or even Maya, he will already know how to compose his shots and tell a story visually. His eyes widened when I explained why you use an establishing shot and why and when you change a scene. I’m so proud.


Go!Animate now has the option to download your films so you can host them wherever. This can now be a very quick and elegant tool to create animated content for YouTube or Hulu and potentially have a solid animated series, as long as the story is there. Hey, look at South Park, its all about story. Its way faster than animating in Flash so you can be razor sharp with topical humor and you can crank out tons of episodes in a very short period of time. You just have to pay a small fee to download the toon.


Also, its FUN! I love animation and I love animating, so this is almost like playing with a toy for me. Yes, its not very sophisticated and you feel like you’re fighting the program, but that’s part of the challenge. Creating something of quality here is difficult and limiting so when you get that scene to read the right way and everything is timed right and acts right, its awesome! They also recently made me a beta tester so now I can add my own pre-animated characters. I’ll be able to work with Jamari on animating elements in Flash which will be even more fun.


But here is the latest cartoon from Jamari and Bralyn, their Christmas Special. We created it to enter Go!Animate’s Jingle Bell Blowout contest to win a Nintendo DSi! I think they’ve got a real shot to win this thing even though there are some good entries there. I’m really hoping that they don’t get beaten by one of the more lude entries that they can’t watch.

And because it has become a family thing for me, I chose Go!Animate to create my Christmas card this year. Everyone else is making those JibJab dancing elves cards, I wanted to be different. I went and found a Christmas song with a Creative Commons license (a concept the GoAnimators haven’t grasped yet… pray for them) and made a little music video card. Check it out!

Merry Christmas again to everyone and I’ll leave you with this link – Larry Lauria’s Christmas Animation Festival

Jamari Animated Update: An Interview on Twitter, an Animatic Clip and a weekend of Spongebob Squarepants

I am SO sorry for the late update!  I’ve been really busy with the recent events and holidays…  Black Friday included!  Here’s an overdue update on how the film and animation related things are going.

First, a report on the Cineviews Film Festival!  Their special guest was fellow Lynchburg, VA area (Amherst County too!) native Tuck Tucker, supervising storyboard artist on SpongeBob Squarepants.  It was a pretty nice setup for the opening night gala.  The nicest restaurants in town were catering and one table even had “Crabby Patties” (sliders, haha).  

When I met Tuck, I think I surprised him when I pulled out my old He-Man VHS tape for him to autograph.  His presentation was very good.  He talked about starting in Hollywood and the projects he's worked on and he talked about what it’s like to work at Nickelodeon and what the workflow is like… it was a nice night.  I even met some nice folks from Charlottesville! 

The next day was the storyboarding workshop.  There was mostly kids there, but there were a few professionals there too.  I met Patrick, an artist out in Evington and Caroline, who scores music for all multimedia!  Tuck played the animatic for an episode of Spongebob that he directed and hit pause at certain parts.  He then instructed the audience to storyboard what would happen next.  He asked me to pitch one of mine to the class.  Pretty cool.  Patrick pitched and a few kids pitched too.  It was fun and I learned a few things about storyboarding… including that they use sharpies to storyboard to force the artists to draw clearly and describe the action and not worry about making pretty drawings.  

It was nice meeting you Tuck and thanks for the kinds words… and for autographing my little Spongebob standy!  It has a place of honor on my desk.  

The film selections at the festival were great...  they were all animated!  I got to see Mary and Max, a fantastically written stop motion film, The Secret of Kells which is an Annie nominee for Best Animated Film this year and I got to check out Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues on the big screen.  I got to meet a lot of the Riverview Artspace folks (Tuck's mom is an artist there!)...  Bravo guys and I can't wait for next year!

Speaking of storyboards and animatics, I have been editing the audio from the recording session and adding the voice and storyboards to create the final animatic for the film.  Some of the audio needed some serious cutting and pasting but I’m pretty happy with how its sounding.  I’m learning as I go through this process.   At the film festival, Tuck talked about how the actors on Spongebob read their lines from the storyboards.  WOW, I kinda wish my actors read from the storyboards on my film!  My actors read from a script.  Their delivery and their interpretation of what happens is different in some places from how its drawn in the storyboard.  However, they open up opportunities for acting and laughs that weren’t there before, so it turned into a win… I’m just going to have to redraw some of the action.  Next project though, my actors will have storyboards to read from instead of a script.  I’m not done editing it together at the time of this writing, so I’m sure I’ll learn even more as I go along.  Meanwhile, here is a small clip of the animatic with the kids voices. Please forgive the animation “blue pencil”…  my revisions will be in sharpie, haha!

Finally, a very special thank you to @Hollywood_Tweet on Twitter.  The Jamari Animated project has been invited to be one of their live Twitter events!

I was checking out the Twitter and I saw a tweet from them saying to join them in their live chat.  I click on it and I’m sent to this awesome page where I hear and see an interactive chatroom.  I can hear the folks from Hollywood Tweet talking, see a chat dialogue from people attending and media elements all around.  I joined in and helped them test out some of the elements of their new toy. Hollywood Tweet will host a series of Twitter events where they showcase filmmakers and musicians.  They have the ability to interview via web cam or microphone, they can play video clips and they can open websites on the audience’s computers, all in realtime.  I think I’m the first animator they’re going to showcase…  which is pretty cool!  It's really humbling and I'm so honored to be picked for this.  This is all thanks to my nephews!  The nice folks at Hollywood Tweet saw my nephew's Halloween cartoon on GoAnimate.com and loved it!  It was the beginning of a great Twitter friendship.  Thanks again guys and I'll keep everyone informed.  It's yet more motivation to get things rolling on this film so I have cool stuff to show and talk about!

Next blog post, the art for my Christmas card this year...  if I can figure out what I want to do...  this is what I did last year, King Moonracer and the Misfit toys.

See you next post!