In today's fast-paced world, whoever has a better skill set and can market themselves better than the others around them, tend to make it to the top. For example, journalism is not about sitting at your desks at a remote corner and making pages or writing anymore, it requires you to be at the ground at all times; use your phones or tablets to their maximum potential to write, make videos, share your story with people all across the world — Thanks to the internet and social media. What if along with writing you could make your own videos easily and increase the reach of your story? Exactly for that, here's an online platform that helps millions of non-professionals to create professional quality videos and help anyone tell stunning visual stories. Run by a young and a vibrant team of creative technologists, Animaker — an online do-it-yourself (DIY) animation video maker, the brainchild of engineers RS Raghavan and Loganathan Kodiyarasu, has facilities in San Francisco, Bangalore and Chennai.
Currently, their most exciting product is called Animaker Class. It helps teachers collaborate with students to create curriculum based animations, infographics, posters and presentations thereby facilitating a great way of learning through creativity. Sounds great, right? We spoke to RS Raghavan, CEO and Co-founder of Animaker for more insights into what the online platform offers and how Animaker Class is being used in numerous educational institutions.
Here's what transpired:
Typically, most online softwares tend to have presets, so can people manually create something on Animaker?
Animaker hosts the world’s largest asset library. We do offer customisation to our users. Our users around the world are looking for a creative platform that facilitates professional quality visual content creation with less time, effort, cost and a certain level of customisation. The level of customisation that we offer cannot be compared with the pixel level customisation offered by tools like Adobe where the user base is different with a completely different set of expectations. And this is not about the capability but rather the logic behind the product creation which has to align with our audience.
For example, A pre-built character on our platform can be subjected to changes in terms of color tone, accessories, look and feel, etc. but one cannot create the character itself from scratch. And this difference is the very essence of the Online DIY video making space versus the professional space.
How is Animaker different from other software?
For ages, we humans have always been the carrier of habits. It’s the technology and medium that keeps changing like the transition from TV to a personal computer to mobile. The millennials and Gen Z have been very proactive in creating videos on Snapchat, TikTok, IGTV, Facebook, etc. You can find the most creative brains there. So it is just a matter of time they will use the DIY tools to create high-quality content like a Pro. This huge human shift which is in the making is going to be facilitated by Animaker.
We already have Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects for animation, then why would people use Animaker?
When you look at the quadrant closely, there is a huge gap for a tool that is highly creative, feature-rich yet very simple to use. This is massive. Animaker is tapping this market. Animaker’s DIY technology and focus is different from Adobe Professional Tools. In the case of Animaker, we are taking the Web, mobile and AI technologies as our top priority. In simple terms, we have built a Creative DIY application which is simple, easy, faster to create, facilitates the creation of content in scale and unlike professional tools, doesn’t cover all the features. It’s a fact that Adobe is the monster in the video market, incredibly powerful but equally difficult to use. As an Adobe professional, you end up devoting your whole life to those Tools. Adobe has a 95 per cent market share, the whole world is looking for a change. A fresh start, so why not us?
How is Animaker Class helping students? How are schools incorporating this?
‘Creativity is the new literacy’ is the concept behind the birth of Animaker Class. Animaker Class helps the teachers collaborate with students to create curriculum based animations, infographics, posters and presentations thereby facilitating a great way of learning through creativity. More than 5000 schools and universities across the world use Animaker Class for various subjects to make learning super fun and engaging.
Tell me more about the founders.
An Engineering and a management graduate from MIT, Chennai, I am a technocrat and a product geek who believes in solving problems of any magnitude with creativity. Inspired by the story of Steve Jobs, I was drawn towards entrepreneurship and product building that could impact the lives of people around the world in a constructive way.
Hailing from the family of successful businessmen, Logu is naturally good at business and managing people. An Engineering and management graduate from MIT, Chennai, Logu was previously part of GE gaining a great level of expertise in project management and quality control before joining me in his entrepreneurial journey as the co-founder.
