Choose The Right Animator For Making Educational Videos

16 Apr 2018, Mon

Education videos are everywhere on YouTube, Coursera, KEEP and many other education or content platforms. Being the main medium of e-learning, videos are more engaging than plain text and delivers more information within a short time period. However, producing videos from scratch is extremely time-consuming - you may end up using more than 10 hours to produce a video of 5 minutes.

Using an animator with content templates is a solution to this problem. Animated video creation platforms emerge from the huge need of producing videos in a barrier-free and cost-effective way. Users can make their own animations by picking a template and adding appropriate elements into it, usually in a drag and drop manner that be easily be handled, even for newbies.

Animators may look alike in terms of user interface and workflow, but the application scope and content availability do vary a lot between different platforms. We have compared the popular choices to help you choose the right tool for animating your teaching materials.

GoAnimate

GoAnimate is a tool for creating professional animated videos. It provides a huge library of templates and objects like scenes, characters and texts that are highly customizable.

As the scenes and characters in GoAnimate are editable, you can tailor-make your own content to illustrate hundreds of industries, occupations, activities and concepts, making your story unique and engaging.

A plus of this platform is that it supports automatic lip-sync, making the animations more vivid without costing the users more time and effort.

GoAnimate provides a free trial period of 14 days, after that its GoPremium plan is charged at USD 89 per month or USD 649 per year (around USD 54 per month).

Currently, GoAnimate offers a 20% discount for users offering a course on KEEP. Interested users can email info@keep.edu.hk with their KEEP account email for a discount code.

PowToon

Like GoAnimate, PowToon allows users to create animations by manipulating pre-created objects. Its gallery features visual elements that come in a wide variety, such as characters in flat, shadow, abstract, outline or even emoji style.

The layout and background options are highly diversified from cute elements like 2D graphics, rounded objects and bright colour combinations to professional ones like photos and minimalist text designs. Moving backgrounds are available as well to give your video a little bit more liveliness.

PowToon (PRO+ plan) costs USD 197 per month or USD 708 per year (USD 59 per month on average). A free plan is also available for making low-resolution videos with limited object options and a watermark.

Animaker

Animaker is a lighter alternative of the above two - features a library with some characters and objects, some backgrounds and texts in different styles and limited customization options, but a relatively affordable price of USD 59 per month or USD 468 per year (USD 39 per month on average) for its Business plan.

In Animaker there are different working modes where each helps you create videos in a specific format, like vertical videos or photo videos. By picking the required mode, choosing from the templates of common animation patterns and updating your text, you can quickly make your own video with a few clicks and edits.

If you do not need much visual variety and are satisfied with their default animation styles, then Animaker could be a choice for you given its lower cost. Similar to PowToon, a free plan with limited functionalities is available.

Let us summarize the features in a table:

Choose the right tool

Besides GoAnimate, PowToon and Animaker, there are lots of online animators, like Wideo and Moovly, that can help you make educational videos. You can go over their website to compare the functionalities and try your hand on their free versions. Find out which one is the best in easing the whole video production task, or the one that can produce the most engaging videos. Also, try seeking the official support for anything you want to ask - see if they are helpful when you need them in the future.

Pick wisely and enjoy your teaching and learning experience enriched with animations!