3 Cool (and Free!) Tools to Make Your Own Animated Movies

If, like me, you’ve always wanted to dabble in movie-making but lack almost every single talent and resource needed to pursue this dream… sigh… these sites are definitely worth looking into.

Go!Animate Some info from the site:

Go!Animate.com is a free online animation tool that enables everyone - no artistic ability required - to create their own animated stories and share them with the world.

Our advanced computer animation platform automates all the difficult parts of animation. Just select the characters you want to work with, and Go!Animate enables you to easily bring them to life. Then instantly share your animations via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg and other social channels directly from Go!Animate’s site.

Of all the tools I tried, I ended up sticking with Go!Animate because it’s the most user-friendly, and I love the graphics (characters, backgrounds, props and so on) already available in the web studio. You can also create your own characters (first character is free, the rest you have to pay for), all of which have built in movements, actions and facial expressions.

The music and sound effects options are really limited, though, so you’ll have to go get clips elsewhere. Also if you want actual voices instead of speech and thought bubbles in your movie, you’ll have to record elsewhere, save as an mp3 and then upload to your Go!Animate account.

I’m still in the middle of about 4 different drafts (making animated movies takes longer than I thought — even when the heavy lifting is automated) but here’s a sample video created by someone else.

XtraNormal Some info from the Site:

Xtranormal’s mission is to bring movie-making to the people… Our revolutionary approach to movie-making builds on an almost universally held skill—typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop.

I tried both the web interface and the desktop app, and while they’re both pretty cool, I do have some issues with them. 

The Xtranormal web studio has a lot of options for characters, backgrounds, voices, camera shots and so on but it’s constantly self-refreshing, which is a bit annoying and confusing. And though the text-to-voice feature is fun, fast and easy, everyone pretty much sounds like a robot. This is just fine if you use their Robots show template, but for everything else, I’d prefer to have more realistic voices.

State, the downloadable software, seems more flexible, but only comes with one basic character/show pack. If you want to use others, you’ll need to purchase them.

So basically, Xtranormal isn’t my first choice, but if you want to come up with quick video, it’s a good tool that can come up with pretty entertaining results if done right. Here’s an Xtranormal video created by TremendousNews, which is pretty hilarious.

MovieStorm Some info from the site:

Moviestorm opens up the world of digital 3D animation to moviemakers who have little or no experience by offering an affordable suite of products that are fun and easy to use; that inspire people to do more; and that combine to form a fully-featured moviemaking environment.

MovieStorm is pretty impressive and to be honest, rather intimidating. It takes quite a while to download, so if you don’t have the best Internet connection, it’ll take you forever to set up. It also requires a higher version graphics/video card than my computer actually had, so I abandoned it pretty quickly.

I did take the software tour though - which was really quite remarkable and professional-looking - so if you have the patience and hardware that I lacked, it’s definitely worth a try.   

Go check out the MovieStorm movie library.