Playing Around With nawmalMAKE

After a couple of hours with nawmalMAKE, a 3D animation software, I created two quick pieces to share.

The first one is a #JamesBound teaser for the ATD ICE conference in Denver. I used robotic voices but you could record your own if you wanted to. It also has backdrops from another video and graphics inside the clip. Raven, my villain, is using gestures and movements. You can also see how cameras can cut or transition.

The second piece is titled WWCMD? If you don’t know about Cathy Moore’s action mapping, you should. Now, imagine the life an unsung hero, Broccoliman in the world of cut-throat training. The Client wants awareness training on the dreaded TPS reports. Now what?

Same inside Storyline: http://rabbitoreg.com/wwcmd/story.html

Behind the Curtains

This is the interface inside the animation tool. You work one location at a time. My characters interact inside a sauna. On the right, you can see all the camera options: each one has a position and angle you can always switch to while the character is talking.

The bottom of the screen contains the “script.” This is not a timeline, it’s lines of script that happens after each other. Within each line, you can control the character’s movement, gestures and the active camera. If you decide to try nawalMAKE, I strongly recommend to watch the how to videos first. But after that, it is very intuitive.

What I especially like about nawmalMAKE:

• Variety of locations and characters
• Ease of use
• Powerful flexibility with cameras (this is the best part to explore; not just preset cameras but you can create your own angle and position and simply save it as as a new one. Then you can cut to or transition to.)
• Markers (markers you create to mark a spot in the location and characters can move to it)
• Some locations include inlays, spots for dropping external items such as the video on the wall or the picture on the iPad
• Export to mp4 to use it anywhere

What I’d love to see coming in the future:

• Character customization
• Interacting with objects
• Tweaking some of the gestures (for example, you can see the hand going through her body in one of the scenes above)

Overall, lots of potential in the software to be used with elearning to tell a story and grab attention. Here’s what it looks like behind the curtains: