I am a skilled freehand drawer but I have never dabbled with animation software.
I have considered buying adobe software in the past but the price is outrageous. I’ve had little success with open source software apart from gimp which is great for what it is.
I work for an international school in China, my job is quite easy and i have plenty of spare time. I’m not rich and I will be more of a hobbyist than professional.
In my spare time I want to learn how to develop educational animations in swf or some kind of flash file that can be interactive. By that i mean simple selection of right or wrong answers and dragging and dropping.
I would like to know if any of the toonboom software is capable of this. I am aware harmony will be well out of my price range, but I want to know if any of the others will allow me to develop what I want (yes it will be a long project) from start to finish.
Toon Boom Studio, Animate, Animate Pro as well as Harmony are able to export to SWF but all are animation application that it does not have interactive probraming as it is in Flash.
There are some ways to add interactivity but I do not know the technology responsible. I have observed links overlaying videos on Youtube that lead to ads, other associated videos and home websites.
Here is one of particular interest. It is an initial video in which the viewer can choose a variation of the theme of the video, in this case what character will sing a song. They created several variations of the animation. You choose the character, then the song and there will be consequences as a result. Very clever ideas IMO. All of Birdbox’s animations are worth checking out.
Those birdbox youtube videos are interesting and kind of what I mean, although, clicking one of the options loads a completely new video rather than staying within the video. I know that is the only way to add interactivity to youtube videos at this time though.
Maybe I should concentrate on this before I get too ambitious and start trying to export into some kind of interactive flash/exe/app file.
I would like to know though, if I make animations in toon boom animate, will I be able to export them in the future to another program like flash pro to add interactivity?
The reason I ask is because I read an old post from 2008 where TB Studio was able to export in flash (.fla) but TB Animate couldn’t despite being the pricier of those two particular options.
Currently, at least, you can only export in .swf format (not .fla) from Studio, Animate, Animate Pro and Harmony.
I have no experience with Flash. If you can add interactivity to imported video formats in Flash TB exports a variety of video formats as well as stills that can be assembled and edited in a video editor utilizing any additional export format capability of that software.