Web Design & Development Guide

Animation portal

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An animation portal is a system where a user is able to submit his or her own animation in a video file format to a website and have it immediately be displayed to other visitors. Other visitors will have the privilege to rate it (typically on a scale of 1 through 10), and give a suitable comment followed by custom ratings such as originality, sound, storyline, graphics, etc. Most existing animation portals currently only accept submissions in the .swf file format, and these can also be subcategorized under the name flash portals.

By far the biggest website containing an animation portal (a flash portal, in this case) is Newgrounds, which boasts over a million members and has over 500,000 submissions. Other websites featuring flash portals include the Stick Figure Death Theatre (SFDT). An example of a website which is an animation portal but not a flash portal is StopMoShorts.com[1], which focuses on stop motion animation and accepts most file types except .swf.

History

As animated films have become more sophisticated and animators more technologically sophisticated, even amateur animators can achieve high quality results and lengthy animations lasting an hour or more were given enough time and effort. Even so, newcomers to the online community can still find it difficult for their own site to gain popularity by means of a portal, leading to a decline in the amateur teenage animation community. Surprisingly, to date, no animation portal script has ever been made, acting as a barrier to newcomers to the area. There has been, however, speculation that E2-Productions^[2] will be releasing a free animation portal script to the public soon.

Internet animations evolved from being frail drawings of stick men to using a wide variety of different styles as artists began testing the limits of the Flash software. At the peak of stick men animation (mostly known as stick anims using tools such as Pivot), stick sites began popping simultaneously around the internet, showcasing animations such as the hit series Joe Zombie, by Rob Den Bleyker. However, these "stick sites" have been on the decline in favor of higher quality animations.

Technology

Most animation portals are run by a MySQL database, though it is said to be possible to create one using just PHP "flat files". A portal run by Flat Files would be much harder to create and update, but it is probably possible if you have commitment. There are no known with a portal run by flat files as of now.

References

1. ^ StopMoShorts.com
2. ^ E2-Productions web site
3. Cartoon Network

4. Mike-Designs.com

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Animation portal
SWF