Products
Product: Toon Boom Studio 6.0, Flip Boom Classic 5.0, Flip Boom All-Star 1.0
6/1/2011 By:
www.toonboom.com ¦ Retail price: Flip Boom Classic starts at $40;
Flip Boom All-Star starts at $70; Toon Boom Studio starts at $150.
By MaryAnn Karre
Toon Boom Animation has expanded on and improved its
selection of animation software with the addition of Flip
Boom All-Star and features that are more advanced in Toon
Boom Studio.
Quality and Effectiveness: There are three products in
this collection:
¦ Flip Boom Classic is
easy enough to be used
by younger students, yet it
provides all the tools they
need to make very simple
animated films. The drawing
tools consist simply of
a brush, a fill tool, and an
eraser. Version 5.0 includes
more than 75 new templates
and a library of more
than 100 sounds organized
by theme.
¦ Flip Boom All-Star is the newest addition to the
Toon Boom lineup, and it provides more features for upperelementary
and secondary
students.
As with Flip Boom
Classic, the user
interface resembles
those of other familiar
drawing programs,
since there
are standard drawand-
paint tools to
the left of the drawing
space, but this
program includes
a brush, a pencil, a
paint can, rectangle,
ellipse, straight line,
and text. Users can
import more than
1,000 digital pictures; drag and drop animation-ready drawings
from the extensive clip-art library; and create original
drawings.
¦ Toon Boom Studio is probably most appropriate
for high school students and hobbyists, as it is the most
sophisticated of the
three programs,
featuring the mostprofessional
tools
and the greatest
number of publishing
options. Toon Boom
Studio 6.0 provides
an assortment of animation
techniques and expands
its capabilities even further
with “bone rigging” features.
This technique lets
animators point and click to
add segments and joints to
characters to make movements
much more realistic
and easier to control.
Projects can be published
for print, TV , HDTV , the
Web, Facebook, YouTube, and iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
Creative Use of Technology: Each of these three
products uses traditional animation principles and intuitive
design to make animation fun and easy for a particular
group.
Suitability for Use in a School Environment: All
the Toon Boom products include curricula that can be used
in artistic and cross-disciplinary areas. Animation can be
used both to teach and as a tool for assessment in any subject
while enabling students to learn to work collaboratively
to develop real-world skills in communication, logical thinking,
and self-expression.
Top Features
¦ Flip Boom Classic is easy enough for a
young student to use, and Flip Boom
All-Star and Toon Boom Studio offer
more features and creative options. All
three provide enough support to enable
students to produce professionallooking
animations.
¦ Toon Boom and Flip Boom can create
good animation for a reasonable price.