Animation and Video Life

I first reviewed video creation site Renderforest back in November of 2017. Since then they have been adding more and more content packs/tools to their cloud based video creation studio, branching into animated explainer video territory in the process (as well as logo and website design too).

This review is focussed on their 3D Explainer Toolkit, but keep in mind, along with several different animated toolkits (including whiteboard), Renderforest has toolkit/templates to suit almost any video need from logo stings and music visualizations, through to complete video templates that can be highly customized with your own content. Click here to browse their template library.

I am planning to review some of their other animated toolkits in the future but their 3D Explainer Toolkit particularly caught my eye because few (if any?) similar cloud animation services offer 3D animated styles.

Renderforest's editing studio revolves entirely around mixing and matching pre-animated scene templ…

The Dork Knight was one of the very first animations I created in 2008 on the then very new GoAnimate (now known as Vyond) website and animation studio. At the time it was featured as a Staff Pick and spawned two 'sequel' animated shorts.

A very loose parody of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dork Knight reimagines Bruce Wayne as a preteen nerd who thinks he can be a superhero. This version of the character is rich enough to have a butler (Alfred) but lives a more suburban lifestyle with his 'Batcave' being his mother's garage.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, over the years I've bought probably thousands of dollars of CrazyTalk Animator content packs that I've barely used. I really want to do more animation that doesn't take months to complete and is just made for the fun of telling a story.

Remaking my old GoAnimation shorts is something for years I thought would be a fun challenge so I finally decided to give it a shot. Rather than use…

Reallusion recently announced the next iteration of their 2D Animation studio, CrazyTalk Animator 3, by unveiling a new name and a work in progress page on their website showcasing some of the new features.

Now known as Cartoon Animator 4, the new name signifies that CrazyTalk Animator has grown far beyond giving bodies to the morph based heads in CrazyTalk and evolved into, as their tagline states, the one-for-all 2D animation software.

CrazyTalk Animator 3 was such a leap forward, and has had so many new features added through periodical updates, that you might wonder if there was anything left to implement that would wow users. But Reallusion has managed to do just that.

Some of the features revealed, which are explained in more detail, with video, on their WIP 1 page, include:
Motion EnhancementAuto IK RigSmart IK SystemMotion RetargetingCustom UI Rig Smooth Head Turn360 Degree Head TurnG4 360 Head CreatorAnimal or Human Live PerformanceWebcam Facial MocapReal-time Lip SyncUpper B…

If you create any kind of content, product or service online or off, whether you're a social media influencer, running a small business, writing a blog, making online video, or any number of other activities Design Wizard may be the cloud based graphics app for you.

What is it? Design Wizard speeds up the graphic design process by giving you a library of pre designed templates, you can customize, suited to almost any situation.
The process is simple. Choose a template size suited to the type of graphic you're designing. For example a Facebook Page Banner image or a Youtube Channel page image. Select a design along the lines of the style you're going for, then tweak and customize the design with your own text and/or graphics.

There are templates for almost every conceivable graphic design situation from Facebook cover pages right through to DL print flyers and more.


All of the templates and any images in Design Wizard's library are licensed for commercial use, so you&#…

With the redesign finished, Animation and Video Blog (i.e. this blog) is now Animation and Video Life to bring it in line with my other blog, which I recently rebranded as The Extraordinary Tourist Life.

Why the New Name? The purpose of the new names (but same URLs) is to kind of distance both blogs from the term 'blog' and to reposition them as more online magazines. Which is really what both sites have always been - where as a blog is more of a diary or journal, at least in its original incarnation.

The addition of the word Life is very appropriate as I'll still be writing about my own projects and life inside animation and video, but it also extends to anyone's life in this field. Making it easier for me to have guest writers, should I choose to do that in the future.

Easier to Read and Navigate on Any Device One of the main goals of the redesign was to make this site more adaptable to any size screen. Whilst the site looks best on a full size screen, it now adapts…

I realize I haven't posted anything to this blog since my last update in August. Largely because I haven't really worked on any of the things mentioned in that post that I was hoping to be going on with.

Instead I've been focussed on completely upgrading and redesigning my main blog (now known as The Extraordinary Tourist Life or TET Life for short) into a more lifestyle magazine look and mobile friendly design. You should follow the link and check it out. It took quite a bit of work but I'm really proud of how it looks now.

This Blog is Getting a Makeover Whilst I'm on a roll with redesigning things (I also gave my TETAnimations Youtube channel page a mini makeover), during November I will be giving this blog a similar makeover and template to my TET Life blog. Though it definitely won't be a matching template this time. I really want my two blogs to have their own identity moving forward.

This post is a heads up for that change which will begin happening pro…