Animatron is a nice tool for creating animated videos and images. I learned about it from Larry Ferlazzo a couple of weeks ago and I finally got some time to try it this morning.

The concept behind Animatron is similar to that of Wideo and Powtoon. You drag and drop characters on a background scene and then choose how long each character will be displayed on the screen. You can also set the length of time for each character in a scene to be in motion. By using Animatron’s timeline editor I was able to make objects appear and disappear from a scene. The best feature of Animatron is that I can record audio directly over the animation. The built-in recording tools lets you see the scene while you’re recording so that you can precisely synchronize each scene with its audio track. Larry reported that the audio wasn’t great, but I found it to be fine when I recorded with my Blue Snowball microphone.

Scenes created in Animatron can be downloaded as videos and or as GIFs. Animatron’s free plan limits you to ten seconds of download time. The free plan will let you embed and or share longer scenes via social media. The other limitation of the free plan is that you can only create five projects before you’ll have to delete one.

Applications for Education
Animatron could be a good tool for students to use to bring written stories to life in animated videos. The user interface on Animatron takes a while to understand and it could frustrate students younger than age 13.