Go and Animate with GoAnimate

Last month, Learning Solutions Magazine published Tips for Using GoAnimate in eLearning,by Gary Lipkowitz, COO of GoAnimate. Now I’m here to give you a proper reviewof the product. I’ll confess that I misunderstood the product at first glancelast year, thinking it was a video editor, so I was a little slow to try outGoAnimate. When I finally did try it, what I found blew me away!

Videos?

Yes, you domake videos with GoAnimate. However, these are animated videos, notlive-action movies. These can be very effective for eLearning applications andmuch less expensive than assembling live actors in the correct setting withproper lighting and all of the other necessary elements of live-action shoots.GoAnimate contains a surprisingly diverse number of choices to make animatedmovies that fit your custom needs.

In theproduct you’ll find most everything you need to quickly create the kinds ofmovies that we so often need in eLearning scenarios. For instance, you cancreate movies that let the learner see how to deal with problem customers.Create several, in fact, so that you can show specific instances of whathappens when the learner chooses a wrong action.

GoAnimateis cloud-based. You create your animated videos directly online, so there is noneed to install the application on your hard drive. This means you can accessthe application from any Internet-connected computer, but you should have agood, fast connection.

When you’reready to start, you’re offered two choices, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: You can start with a template or make a video from scratch

Using a video template

If youchoose to start with a video template, you have the benefit of getting a fasterresult. There are 15 templates at the moment, with more expected in the future.Figure 2 shows you some of the templates available.

Figure 2: Some GoAnimate templates

Once you’vechosen a template, it’s a simple, four-step process to getting your videocompleted.

Step 1—choose a setting

Eachtemplate lets you choose from a number of different settings, from five to 16or so. The settings can vary quite a bit, even within a specific template. SeeFigure 3.

Figure 3: Step 1—choose a setting

Step 2—select your actors

Next, youcan select from 25 actors to use in your setting. Some of the actors resemblesome well-known people; others are a bit more nondescript. You can also uploadand use your own characters. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: Step 2—select your actors

Step 3—type in or record your dialog

Now you havea choice to make. Will you record the voices for the conversation the actorswill have, or would you like GoAnimate to use one of several built-in voices?The built-in voices sound pretty good, though of course you’ll get betterresults with real human voices. Using real humans costs more and you want tomake sure that the recordings are of good quality. You can record your voicesdirectly in Go!Animate, but I highly recommend that you follow properguidelines for recording high-quality audio. See Gary Lipkowitz’s Tips for Using GoAnimate in eLearningfor some very good suggestions for audio recording.

In Figure 5,you see a dialog of four lines between our two actors. You can set upconversations up to 30 lines, plenty for most situations.

Figure 5: Step 3—create your dialog

Figure 6shows some of the many voices available for the dialogs. Note that if youchoose a foreign voice speaking English, it speaks English with an accent. Forinstance, choosing Silvana for the actor Mary will let you hear her Englishlines spoken with an Italian accent. The results can be hard to understand.Stick with a proper voice for your dialog language unless you really want tohear an accent and then expect it to be heavy in most cases.

Figure 6: Choosing a voice

Step 4—preview your video

You’realmost done! Now just preview the video to see if you like the results. If youdon’t, go back and edit some more. If you do, you can immediately publish thevideo. At that point, you can post it to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr or exportit to YouTube as an MP4 video file at three different quality settings, 360p,720p (HD), or 1080p (HD Blu-ray). You can also get an embed code to use on webpages.

The wholeprocess above takes five to ten minutes! I find that remarkable. GoAnimatetemplates are quick and easy.

Create a video from scratch

There are manytimes, however, that you want to create a video without a template.  This is where most of GoAnimate’s power lies.The number of options here is quite impressive. Start by choosing a category. You can see some of the categories inFigure 7.

Figure 7: Creating a video from scratch

Figure 8shows you the editing environment. Here you are free to edit the movie, takingthe steps in any order you wish. As you can see, you start with a blank stage. Youcan zoom the stage in and out from 50 to 400 percent, allowing you to placeitems precisely where you wish.

Figure 8: The video editing environment

Create scenes

You startwith one scene and can add scenes one after the other. You can applytransitions between scenes, a good idea if the scenes are different. You canalso time scenes according to:

• Whatyou’ve placed in the scene already
• Thetime taken by the voices
• Anyspecific time you wish

See Figure9.

Figure 9: Transitioning and timing scenes

Add actors

Start byadding as many actors as you wish on the stage in your scene. As soon as youadd an actor, you have the opportunity to provide the actor with a voice. SeeFigure 10.

Figure 10: Adding actors

Figure 11shows how you can place the character in many different poses and choose frommany different expressions, leading to hundreds of combinations of poses andexpressions.

Figure 11: Choosing poses and expressions

Move and rotate actors

Now the realfun begins. You can tell GoAnimate to go and animate the actor simply bychoosing an option called Slide. When you select the Slide option, a ghostimage of the actor will appear. Move the ghost to any other position on thestage and when you preview or publish the video, you’ll see the actor moveacross the stage in the direction you indicated. You can also rotate thecharacter in its original or its final position. When you play the movie,you’ll see that the character will move and also rotate with a smooth tweenanimation. See Figure 12.

Figure 12: Rotating and moving actors

Pan and zoom

You can alsopan and zoom the camera using the Composition options. There are easy guides onthe stage that you can use to define the pan and zoom, or you can specifyspecific pixel sizes and positions. See Figure 13.

Figure 13: Panning and zooming

Add more elements

There aremore features to GoAnimate that you can use to further enhance your videos.

1. Add Text Bubbles (Figure 14)
2. Add Backgrounds and Templates (Figure15)
3. Add Icons (Figure 16)
4. Add Music and Sound Effects (Figure17)
5. Add Transitions (Figure 18)

Figure 14: Text bubbles

Figure 15: Backgrounds and templates

Figure 16: Icons

Figure 17: Music and sound effects

Figure 18: Transitions

Import your own assets

If you wish,you can upload your own images, sounds, voices, Flash animations, and videofiles to use in your GoAnimate videos, so you can truly customize your videosto the look and feel you want.

Conclusion

GoAnimateruns about $50 a month for a premium business subscription, but you can startwith a $25 a month basic subscription if you’d like to try it out. Those pricesare based on paying a year in advance. You can also go month-to-month for $39for a basic subscription and $79 for a business subscription.

All in all,I’m kind of loving this product. I plan on using it quite often. While it doesnot take the place of full-motion videos, in many instances it does a fine jobof replacing the need for such videos at a much lower cost and effort.