We love watching and sharing what our users are doing with GoAnimate. A particularly delightful video traveled around the GoAnimate office that was created by a father/daughter duo, Jamye and Colt Craig.
At just nine years old, Jamye produced, wrote, and starred in her first animated video with GoAnimate. What started as a school project turned into an empowering tool for the 3rd grader to find her comedic voice.
Take a look below at the lesson Jamye created using GoAnimate.
Jamye’s fun science lesson is a perfect example of the creative ways GoAnimate can be used in education, and how easy it is to create a video. We caught up with her father, Colt, an instructional designer in the IT department at GM Financial, and GoAnimate subscriber, to learn more about his experience creating an animated video with his daughter.
How do you use GoAnimate professionally?
CC: I actually started using GoAnimate at GM Financial after my boss tasked me with finding a program that we could use to create educational videos. After looking at several different vendors, I landed on GoAnimate because of the flexibility that’s allowed in the program and the overall professionalism and clean look of the site. It’s pretty evident that your team puts in a lot of work into the platform.
Our main videos are on compliance, but we use GoAnimate for training and even internal marketing. We have one video where we turned our senior leaders into characters and had them sing happy birthday.
How did this video come to be?
CC: Jamye came to me saying, “I have this project, and the teacher said you can do the project in any media format you want.” I had just finished making a couple GoAnimate videos for work so I asked, “Do you want to do an animated video cartoon?” and she said, “Well, of course I wanna do a cartoon!” I showed her GoAnimate and let her create a character to get a feel for it and see if she really did want to put in the work. To start, she had a requirement on the project that you have to have two facts per planet, so that’s how Jamye started her script.
Even as a third grader, at nine years old, she really dove into the GoAnimate Character Creator and choosing the different actions for the characters. Then, when she realized that she was not limited to just the library of assets and could add her own images, like the starry background (which is what we used for the background of the entire video) it really took off. I helped her out with Photoshop to get the selected images to where they needed to be to be used as a prop in the program. It kind of went from there. Jamye put in the work and she really enjoyed it.
After she wrote the entire script and I took a look at it and I said “Why don’t we make it kind of funny?” and she was like, “Oh, we can do funny”.
We worked on the jokes together. I just left the microphone on and we played off each other. Then when we found one that we thought fit really well she would recut it and that’s the one we would use.
We picked out weird pictures, like a brain flying across the screen and apparently the brain was the coolest part of the video to her class. You can get an idea of third grade humor.
Jamye’s a really shy kid. After watching the video, her teacher said, “I didn’t know she had such a personality!” It allowed her to give a different side of her that no one really gets to see in the classroom.
What was your advice to your daughter as she made her video?
CC: Keep it simple. There’s a million things that we could have done with that video to make it really dazzling. One of the things that I remembered watching as a kid was Schoolhouse Rock and every episode I watched, I would remember what it was about. I showed her a couple Schoolhouse rock videos on YouTube and told her to think about it like that, keep it simple.
How was it received at school?
CC: She got an A+ on the project! Her teacher loved it so much that a month or so later when they had an open house at school she played Jamye’s video on loop on the big projector screen for everyone to see as they came into the classroom because she was so proud of it.
Afterwards, she emailed me and asked for permission to use it to kick off the project for next year’s classes. Jamye’s teacher thoroughly enjoyed it.
What was your favorite part?
CC: Honestly, my favorite part was me and her working together.
GoAnimate is designed to allow business people with no background in animation (or in special circumstances, nine year olds completing a class project) to quickly and easily create animated videos. For schools, like Jamye’s, that encourage creativity in any medium, GoAnimate for Schools is a great resource. It is a school-safe platform that allows teachers and students to create animated videos in the classroom under the supervision of their teacher. Either way, happy animating!
