Philip Jackson is a multimedia designer at Monarch Media. Monarch Media operates out of Santa Cruz, CA, and specializes in eLearning course development, multimedia and flash programming, mobile learning and app development, and learning management system implementation and hosting. The courses and projects they develop often include animated cartoons that make learning more engaging and interactive. For one recently completed project, an online tobacco vendor training program for the State of Iowa's Alcoholic Beverages Division, Monarch Media designed six animated “How to Refuse” scenarios. It produced these scenarios using Toon Boom Animate to create realistic 3D environments in which tobacco retailers can practice the skills they’ve been taught throughout the training
How long have you been in this profession?15 yrs.
No. I also use Adobe Flash.
Animate saves me a lot of time in the creation of complex time-line animations, but I still use Flash for creating simple text animations and adding interactivity with Action Script.
Animated Cartoons to supplement on-line training and educational courses
I start off with hand-drawn caricatures and digitize them in Toon Boom Animate.
My favorite features in Animate are:
The drawing tools and customizable color palettes allow for quicker digitizing of hand-drawn caricatures. Also, the 3D Camera features make it easy to zoom, pan and add depth-of-field and perspective.
Yes. Animate’s feature set has streamlined the process of creating time-line based cartoon animations, from digitizing drawings to exporting the final flash video.
Are youmore efficient today compared to your production toolset used previously ?
Yes, Animate has sped up the development process. Its feature set takes Flash-based animation to the next level.
Yes, for me it is possible to create comparable animations in Flash, but Animate makes the job much quicker and less frustrating.
I enjoy using Animate and would recommend it to others. I was able to transition quite easily from Flash to Animate and found the documentation and instructional videos to be a big asset is learning to use its tools and feature set.
As a long-time Flash user I found much of the Animate interface to be familiar.
At first, some of the tools were difficult to find and figure out how to use, but the video tutorials taught me everything else I needed to know in order to produce quality animations.
