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Philosophy & History... |
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CartoonSmart was officially started back in 2004 by Justin Dike to teach people how to use Flash. Prior to that he was an Animation Director and held training sessions to get new recruits up to speed on how to use Flash for animation and illustration. Naturally, those were CartoonSmart's first topics. One course lead to another, we added Flash game programming tutorials, web design lessons, then cut to many years later, and we teach just about everything under the sun.
The name "Cartoon Smart" originally meant "smart with cartoons", but it's now taken on
a slightly different meaning as we've branched out the site into so many new areas, many of which are programming related. Today it implies two topic of study that should converge: "arts" and "smarts". A programmer with some great art to use is a killer combination. And so is an artist or animator with moderate programming skills. Our philosophy is that a little learning in the right topic can make a huge difference in a portofilio, application, game, web design, job interview, or monthly income.
If you learn more, you can earn more. And what we sell is not expensive.
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What we do best: High Definition Training Videos |
We've been making HD training videos since the beginning. Even before YouTube began. Wild right?... CartoonSmart, somewhat accidently, began producing high definition video tutorials LONG before they were mainstream on the internet. Screen capturing the work area of a 720p space on a computer is actually a bit cramped, but that's technically a high def video. CartoonSmart has always sold videos of at least that size (sometimes larger than 720). Before streaming HD videos really caught on with sites like YouTube and Vimeo, we just zipped them up and delivered the entire movie file with any other source files to use. We still do exactly that.
This way when you buy a tutorial from CartoonSmart, you know you've always got it on your computer. If your internet goes down, or if you want to take your laptop somewhere without a connection, the movie is always available to play from your hard drive. So what if your hard drive breaks? Customers can always redownload a product we are still selling. The download links sent to your email after a purchase can be used to refresh an order from years ago.
If you're curious about size, screen capture programs reduce the size of videos tremendously because from frame to frame, the screen doesn't change all that much compared to TV/Film videos. Most of the user interface of the program is constant and we record around 15 fps (compared to 30) so the movie files are not hard to download and don't use up much space.
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Aside from the videos... |
High quality video tutorials are our main products, but we can't help dabbling in some other areas from time to time. We've developed apps, templates, royalty free art collections, app starter kits (a hybrid of template and tutorial), and we've recently been writing an iBook on Cocos2d programming for the iPad.
We also look for new talented instructors and help sell / promote their tutorials. We've gotten good at marketing tutorials over the years, so we are always searching for people like us that want to work from home and simply teach what they know how to do well. If you've created something great and want to share what went into it, tell us about it. Don't be shy.
We also help our students. We love showing off what students have accomplished on our blog (more on that below). We also get tons of job requests that we can't possibly do. So if we can put a student in touch with a client, we will make that connection. Finally, we answer email from students.
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CartoonSmart-run Blogs... |
We keep a few blogs handy for organizing everything going on here...
CartoonSmart's Behind the Scenes Blog - Delve into the mind of owner, Justin Dike, as he posts whatever random coolness inspires him, the latest news on the site, and other confessions / secrets running this website. Visit it!
CartoonSmart's Free Videos Blog - An archive of free videos we've uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube. You might find this site to be an essential bookmark. We give away over 100 hours of great video, and even offer more hours for doing simple things like tweeting your followers about the site. Visit it!
CartoonSmart's Affiliate Blog - A blog for affiliates to grab images or text to help advertise our products AND make a tidy little commission on the sale themselves. You send us the leads, we'll work on selling them great stuff, and you can sit back and collect payments from Paypal. Even if you don't run a popular blog, anyone with a Twitter account could be a good affiliate. Visit it.
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