Ever wanted to hang out with Spock, Steve Jobs, and the cast of Street Fighter? Here’s your chance. GoAnimate, a web app that lets you generate fully animated cartoons where you can make animated characters act out whatever you’d like, has launched a new character builder that will let you integrate yourself, your friends, or celebrities into your movies.
Using the character builder should be pretty easy for anyone who has ever built a Mii on Nintendo’s Wii console or used one of the other similar avatar builders scattered across the web. To get started, you can choose from one of a few dozen pre-generated characters, many of which are not-so-mysteriously named things like “Steve J.” or “Bill G.”, or you can start from scratch. Then you work through a variety of physical attributes, including hair, face shape, eyes and eyebrows, and more. Depending on how accurate you want to be the process can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 20.
To be honest, I had some trouble figuring out how to use some of the app’s features — some of the UI design is a little confusing. But once I had it figured out, I found GoAnimate to be quite fun. I spent more time than I’d care to admit playing around with the character builder, building what is proabably an overly flattering version of myself (the pale guy in the picture below talking with Spock). The rest of the characters came from the library of templates created by GoAnimate’s designers — they’re supposed to be Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and my boss, Michael Arrington (I find the resemblance to be pretty bad on that one, but there are plenty of characters that do fit their celebrity counterparts). Oh, and we’re all on the USS Enterprise.
Once you’ve created your characters and placed them in your virtual set, you can choose from a variety of facial expressions and actions that each character can perform. You can also make them move around, be it by walking, running, or sliding. The animations all look smooth, and you can put everything together using the timeline at the bottom of the screen. You can also incorporate images and sound effects, as well. The process isn’t as intuitive as I’d like, but it doesn’t take too long to get the hang of it.
We last covered GoAnimate back in Feburary, when the site announced it had gotten the rights to include Star Trek (it also has Street Fighter and a few other franchises).
Spock? Who the hell puts spock in there?
Win.
That is awesome!
In the 2nd pic, second person is it Bill ?
Funny :p
That’s awesome!
Why those characters look like from Family Guy?
Wow! love this one, if it just had a feature that take picture and try to give the first setting it would be great.
Incredible technology. I could easily see these cartoon type movies appearing on YouTube and blog sites as video blogs.
Meh. Honestly, you can get the same results with GIFs and Powerpoint. Hopefully, there will be more customizable features in the future. Until then, learning to use the basic features of Flash (which should only take an hour or two) remains the better option.
i guess they are built for those who are not willing to draw / illustrate. Learning Flash could be fast but learning to draw takes years.
I guess this is the next step from http://www.stripgenerator.com ?
This isn’t a new site. GoAnimate opened last summer. Last October, I wrote about the stereotyped people of color that the service offers: http://faboomam...comment-2944786
They finally added a create-you-own character, so you can break out of their stereotypical ones they’ve kept on there.
I I would love to see steve jobs char.
Looks like fun! Gotta go try it out!
I have been using Goanimate to make animations for about six months and I am amazed that I can set up an animation so fast. The new feature allowed me to put my friend in an animation to re-live his picking up this weird girl in a bar last month. It helps to have a brain to set up something funny which is hard for some people.