Plotagon

Pros

• Easy to use
• Features a great community of users
• Beautiful graphics

Cons

• Not all resources are free

Aimed and kids and young teens, Plotagon is a Windows app for creating 3D animated videos featuring characters, dialogue and a main plot. To achieve this, users are provided with hundreds of resources including scenes, characters, sounds, music and effects. Even more than that, they can modify the actions of the characters by giving them speech lines, physical attributes, emotional characteristics, motivations, ranges of movement and so on. Once created, the animations can be exported and shared with other Plotagon users or with the general public through social media.

Because it is meant for young audiences, Plotagon favors ease of use, interactivity and fun over complexity. To do this, it uses simple interactive menus reinforced with sounds, visual effects and text pop-ups that help users get a grasp of the process of creating animations. As a result, Plotagon doubles as a teaching tool for learning the basics of computer use and 3D animation. At any rate, however, the software focuses on creativity over everything else, encouraging users to create unique and original stories with a lot of movement, color and personality.

Without a doubt, the stories that you can create using Plotagon are character-based. With that in mind, the programmers of the app included a large library of pre-made characters that you can use. Of course, these characters can be modified according to the user's creativity and the requirements of the story they want to tell. If none of them are convincing enough, however, users can also create their own characters from scratch. Unfortunately, not all character-building options are free to use. That also goes for different scenes, music choices and transition effects.

Before they can see their animation fully realized, Plotagon requires users to create a script that indicates everything that happens. Apart from modifying their words and actions, this script allows users to choose background animations and even facial expressions. The scriptwriter tab is simple and straightforward, making it very easy to edit at any time. Formatted like an actual script, this panel allows kids and teens to get a better grasp of how movie direction really works.

After the animation has been concluded and exported, users of Plotagon are given the option of sharing their work in a few different ways. Before doing so, however, they will have to write a title, a description and a few tags for it. Then, it's all about saving the work and uploading it to the app so other Plotagon users will be able to enjoy it. This is great as it encourages the users in the community to provide each other useful feedback as well as interacting in a myriad of other ways. Alternatively, users can choose to upload it directly to platforms such as YouTube or download the file for safekeeping. Considering all these option

Pros

• Easy to use
• Features a great community of users
• Beautiful graphics

Cons

• Not all resources are free