Sometimes people make computers seem like funeral homes – all serious and dripping with sadness and problems and details. But computers don’t need to be caskets, they can be baskets of fun. All these fear-mongering fear-o-philes out to make your day miserable or worse, to sell you something you don’t need. Shame on those misanthropes.
Today’s Cloudeight Site Pick is just for fun. It will be a lot more fun if you don’t use Google Chrome to visit it, though. For some reason this site doesn’t work well in Chrome – you may even find it’s impossible to use in Chrome. So fire up Firefox or Internet Explorer when (and if) you visit.
Our site pick today is GoAnimate. With GoAnimate you pick a scene, choose your characters, choose the character’s voices (male or female) and type in the dialog. Add a new scene to add new dialog. You can choose the actions your characters take. The text to speech engine works pretty good, so whatever you type in as dialog comes out pretty close to what you type — though sometimes the lack of emotion does add a bit of humor. But hey, it’s a cartoon, right?
A couple of caveats: You have to sign up for a free account. Yes that means giving an email address, choosing a username and a password. But this allows you to save your animations and share them with your friends via email, Facebook, blogs, or even directly through YouTube. If you want more characters, voices, scenes, etc. you can sign up for a premium account – but these are fairly pricey at $58.00 a year. The free account gives you enough characters and scenes and voices to make some fun cartoons. Unless your a cartoon-a-holic, the free version should be just fine if all you want to do is mess around and have a little fun.
If a picture is worth 1000 words then a video is worth what? Ten thousand words? So here is a video, because frankly I’m tired of typing as much as you’re tired of reading:
So take time to make time for fun with your computer. You can do some zany things on our site pick and share your creative zaniness with your friends and family.
Take care! Just attempting to view a sample on the website froze my entire XP computer. I used Mozilla Firefox 3.6. Had to reboot.
It’s a very small flash video, exactly like YouTube videos. If it “freezes” your computer it’s because your computer either doesn’t have enough RAM or you didn’t have enough available resources. There’s no difference between this video and the millions of videos on YouTube — if anything this one is a little smaller.
Not impressed at all – characters are so bally childish I would be embarrassed to use the programme !
Don’t know why you like it – I don’t !
Seen better from kindergarten kids!
It’s a cartoon. Have you ever watched Sponge Bob? Talk about “belly childish”. Cartoons are supposed to be childish. We didn’t say you could create “Fantasia” or “Snow White” on this site. We said you could have fun with it. We never said the characters were “professional”. Your comments are kind of embarrassing actually. Did you even read what we wrote? I don’t see where we ever wrote how great the quality of the characters or scenes were. I think the point was to have fun with it. If you don’t have fun with it, that’s fine, but to ridicule something because you find it childish is in itself puerile, isn’t it? Didn’t Thumper say (in Bambi), “If you can’t say something nice about something, don’t say anything at all?”
We disagree with your comments. It sounds to me like you should lighten up a bit 🙂 There was no call for you to denigrate us simply because you didn’t read the article.