GoAnimate Review

GoAnimate is an incredibly fun and innovative tool used to create your own animations.  I am not just talking about creating still animations, but creating actual movie animations!  How cool is that?  There are several themes you can pick for making your animation, including politics, cartoon classics, Star Trek, Street Fighter, Happy Bunny, and more.  There are plenty of options that can be utilized on GoAnimate, such as: text bubbles, different expressions/actions, backdrops, characters, etc.  When inserting a text bubble, you can just have the words appear in the bubble, or actually get an automated voice to say the words for you.  This is an excellent idea and really adds variety to what you can do.  When inserting characters in your animation, there are many different expressions/actions you can use.  You can make the characters’ facial expressions sad, happy, angry, confused, and sick, among many others.  As for actions, you can make the characters jump, dance, fall down, walk, run, etc.  These facial expressions and actions are all distinct from each other, and look great.  Last but not least, the characters.  There are many characters that you can choose from on GoAnimate.  In each different theme, some characters are free to use, but others you have to pay for (using real money) to earn “GoBucks”.  The price range is from $10 - $100.  This is one downside of GoAnimate.  I was hoping that I could gain all the characters over time, but it appears that I was wrong.  Fortunately, there is still a healthy variety of characters to choose from.  Here is a demo video of GoAnimate, a GoAnimate movie based off of Star Trek, and a hilarious screenshot.  I found another review that summed up GoAnimate nicely as well.  At the end of the day, GoAnimate is a brilliant website for creating animations, and I will give it a score of 8.5/10.

ToonDoo Review

ToonDoo is a fun and easy way to create your very own cartoons/comics without actually having to show off your artistic abilities, or rather, lack of.  On ToonDoo there is absolutely no drawing that needs to be done in order to create a cartoon.  Instead, you use pre-installed characters, backgrounds, and other objects to make cartoons promptly.  I am going to state both the pros and cons of ToonDoo, starting with the pros.  As mentioned before, ToonDoo is such an easy web 2.0 tool to use, and I think almost anyone could adapt to it in a matter of minutes or hours.  You simply just drag and drop characters and backgrounds onto a story board (there are many different types/sizes).  You can also add dialogue, which can be pre-included phrases on the website, or you can type your own in the text bubbles, which is pretty neat.  You can view other ToonDoo creations made by various users around the world, and I believe you can share your own cartoons as well.  Here is a picture of a toondoo creation.  There is a lot to like about a website such as ToonDoo, but that doesn’t mean it is without its faults.  Sure, you can create cartoons very fast with built in characters etc…but that doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity.  There is no drawing that can be done, which was disappointing.  I think it would be cool if you could combine built in animations and draw your own, to give it some more style.  Also, you have to make an account to use ToonDoo.  This is understandable for the sharing aspects, but I think it would be nice if you could just go on the website, make a cartoon, and save it on your computer.  It's also worth noting that ToonDoo has another website called ToonDoo Spaces, in which you can make comics in a community, with others.  But, you have to pay for it, so I did not get to try it out.  Here is an example of ToonDoo in video format, and also a teacher's guide to Toondoo.  Overall, I found ToonDoo kind of fun and very easy to use, but also lacking in features, so I will give it a score of 6.5/10.

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 refers to a website in which you can edit, share, and interact with others around the world.  An example of a 2.0 website would be Facebook.

Sources cited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0