Fuzzwich is a dead simple application for creating and publishing animated shorts. The animation editor comes pre-populated with a random selection of music, background, and cartoon characters. However, you can easily change them to any of their other 42 characters, 15 songs, or 14 backdrops. The content library will be changing over time, and they plan on adding a character editor soon.
After you have the basic layout, you can animate and resize the sprites in real time by just dragging and dropping them around the scene. The player records you movements as the clip runs. Some characters and scenes come with animations (moving arms or mouths), and speech bubbles can also be adrded. After publishing it can easily be embedded or linked to on another site. I made one myself in 5 minutes and I’m completely addicted. I’m a big fan of these hypnotic pandas.
One serious limitation of the service is that users cannot upload their own images or sound files and include them in cartoons. They do, however, plan on letting people to upload their faces on the cartoons. They also have a more feature rich animation studio in the works, but have initially focused on this simpler editor since it’s accessible to a wider audience.
We’ve covered two other startups, Aniboom and MyToons, that are aiming to be the “YouTube” of online cartoons. Fuzzwich competes with Aniboom’s application and MyToons somewhat, but it is also different. Fuzzwich provides a simple way to create cartoons hosted on the site. Aniboom has an animator called Shapeshifter, which is like a Paintshop pro for animation. MyToons do not offer cartoon creation tools.
Fuzzwich is a Y Combinator company.
Great idea and execution, congrats to the guys. The design, initially, feels a little amateurish but this feeling goes away after you see the player a couple of times.
The videos look very fun and engaging so far too - again, great work!
Hey guys… Youtube is down it seems
lol…these are hilarious. i’m captain picard bitch!
YTMND has $20,000 revenue monthly on $18,000 bandwidth… someone should invest in them.
very nice
Sweet stuff. This is great.
Nice! This is a great idea.
Great for Dorks with nothing to do.
Hehe nice one Sam. Who is seriously going to spend hours coming up with something serious on these sites.
why are most the sites mentioned on this website from Ycombinator surely there are others out there doing great things
Great site! Another reason for people to murder their time online …
I wish Paul Graham funded more companies which solved some “real” problems like he talks about in his essays. I am a huge fan of his articles but I hope to see him applying all that in a bigger way.
Anyway, I guess this one again is just another site “built to flip”!
fricking hilarious… love it
The lesson here: Affiliation with YC is the ticket to getting any polished-dog-turd-of-a-Web-2.0-startup linked by TechCrunch.
I’ll give it to the founders… they executed well. But that would mean volumes more if they executed on a different product or service that had a little more substance in terms of the value it creates. Never mind that this will fetch a handsome ROI for its founders. But any website with a modicum of traffic can do that these days.
To quote from a guy whose name needs no mention, “…it demonstrates just how easy it is to start a web company today, and just how important it is to create one that makes the world better, not just noisier.”
Note that that’s nothing against Y Combinator. Love what they’ve done for the young entrepreneur community. I just don’t “get it” with this one.
Maybe it’ll grow on me.
DigitalFilms.com has offered something similar for the past 6 years.
Thanks for ruining my morning. Stegasaurus vs. Ninja in the Catskills.
@Brian
No worries, not everybody can possibly like everything that gets pushed to the internet. However, we know user generated animation is a huge space right now. Our goal is to make everybody interested an animator, while maintaining an extremely low barrier to entry. Fuzziwch Mini-vid is our first product to allow viral, conversational and accessible video animations. Our far more feature rich online music animator is currently well under development and will hopefully provide the ‘more substance’ that we are sure everybody expects. Of course, much larger products take far more time to polish and push out. We were excited enough about Mini-vid that we wanted to go on and share
Thanks for the feedback!
Certainly a great job. This gives lot of potential for building great television around a site like http://www.toontowntv.com
@Seekely:
You’re right — it makes sense to go live with an offering sooner than later. Neat application of “ready, fire, aim.” Anyway, maybe I was too quick to judge. In fact, the MySpace vid did give me a laugh
Good luck guys.
Very cute - I love these type of sites because it means that more great content appears on the web. Not everyone wants to create a cartoon but those that do entertain us all and more vids mean more entertainment - I love it!
That kicks ass. Love it.
Anyone who doesn’t like takes life way to serious.
http://fuzzwich.com/minivid/minivid.php?vid=494
Where’s the business model? This is just another one of those ‘made for flip’ sites that TC seems to have a hard-on for.
I wish I had the time to look at all these neat new sites while I was at work -
@Mike
Not that we can blame your skepticism, but is it really important that we write out our business model ? We want people building, watching and sharing video animations. Have some fun! Add to the noise internet! Let us worry about the business model :).
And don’t worry. As we grow and more of products are pushed out, our business model will become very apparent. However, these things take time, and for now we are satisfied with people simply enjoying our creation.
Come on, you have to admit, http://www.fuzzwich.com/minivi.....hp?vid=504 is pretty hilarious.
I didn’t think I’d be in to this type of thing, but this is hilarious! Very creative.
I would say this product is a incredible improvement to the majority of viral bling that is out there. It’s a great way to really codify a set of one-liners or retell a ridiculous story. If they just had a dolphin, I could retell one from my past.
HA — I think I found a vid where someone put a url to their site in a speech bubble!
http://fuzzwich.com/minivid/minivid.php?vid=459
Great job Fuzzwich team — you got a fan.