For those who wished that Rick Perry would have been more animated in the Republican presidential debates, here’s your chance for a do-over. On Monday, New York-based Web animation studio GoAnimate launched a new election app allowing anyone with an Internet connection to quickly create their own animated political videos for free and share them on social media.
The Flash-based web app launched with 10 candidates to begin with, including President Obama and alternating Republican frontrunners Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann. There are 20 animated characters in total, from House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to journalists to debate moderators, voters and “locals” like bartenders, as well as five different settings – from a debate stage to a bar. But GoAnimate plans to continuously update their library and add new characters and settings through the General Election on November 6, 2012.
“Our goal is to maximize relevance and maintain it from now through the General Election,” said Gary Lipkowitz, vice president of GoAnimate, in a telephone interview with TPM, “We want to put a rich media animation tool in all people’s hands thats free and easy to use so that they can make a contribution to the national debate.”
To start, head over to www.goanimate.com/make-a-video/election and sign-up using your email address or Facebook login. Then, GoAnimate will walk you through the process of picking characters, backgrounds and inputting lines. All the characters have their own robotic text-to-speech voice likenesses, but if you’re looking to make your video even more unique, GoAnimate allows users to record their own voice overs, too.
Check out the video I created in about 1 minute:
Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate
All of GoAnimate’s election tools are unlimited and free to use. But budding animators with cash to spare can take the next step of purchasing GoAnimate’s virtual currency, “GoBucks,” or signing up to GoAnimate’s paid subscription “Studio” service, allowing them to take the candidates out of their familiar political settings and put them in any of GoAnimate’s hundreds of diverse backgrounds and alongside its many characters from such recognizable franchises as the “Street Fighter” videogame series.
“In the studio users have a bit more functionality, they can have characters walk or run and do martial arts,” Lipkowitz said, “They can zoom and make close ups and have all of the creative control like a director would.”
Still, Lipkowitz acknowledged his company will be moderating the content for hate speech and pointed out that every video created has the ability to be flagged by users as inappropriate, which will shoot it to the top of a moderator’s list. Videos found to be in violation of the terms of service will be deleted, although users can contest deletion by emailing GoAnimate.
“If they want to discuss deletions with us, they’re welcome to do so,” Lipkowitz said.
GoAnimate’s Saturday morning-style cartoon animation, in glorious 2D, may be best suited to comedy and satire rather than dead-serious campaigning. But Lipkowitz noted that the GoAnimate team took pains over the app’s three-month-long development phase to make sure their likenesses of the candidates were immediately identifiable and, in their own way, lifelike.
“One one hand, the likenesses are caricatures,” Lipkowitz said, “On the other hand, they are startlingly accurate, especially thanks to the lifelike eyes and gestures. We think that anyone who sees our videos will have an immediate, visceral reaction to them.”
By the same token, GoAnimate prides all of it’s animation apps on their ease-of-use and speed. Want to create a video in just a few minutes? Pick your characters, your setting, enter your dialogue and let GoAnimate’s algorithm do the heavy lifting of deciding where to focus the camera and what gestures the characters should make.
The character likenesses, as well as the ability to record your own voice and the sophistication of GoAnimate’s automated algorithm are the qualities that distinguish GoAnimate’s apps from some of its other popular Web animation competitors out there, including XtraNormal, the Montreal-based animation platform that went viral in June 2010 after a disgruntled Best Buy employee used it to make the infamous video “iPhone 4 vs. HTC Evo,” and was nearly fired due to the resulting publicity.
GoAnimate, which launched in 2008, is also one of YouTube’s creative partners in the “YouTube Create” project, which launched in March to allow budding moviemakers the ability to generate their own shorts, even without a camera or any editing software. Lipkowitz said he wouldn’t be surprised if some of the GoAnimate videos that users create end up on YouTube’s politics channel, which launched in early October, but there isn’t a specific agreement for that to happen, yet.
But GoAnimate wants to do more than just entertain: The company launched an educational platform, GoAnimate4Schools, in late 2010 to rave reviews from educators. Lipkowitz told TPM that GoAnimate was working on porting the elections app over to the GoAnimate4School platform as well. Lipkowitz didn’t have a firm estimate of when that would be ready, but said “soon.”
