TupiTube is prominent software to create 2D Animation videos. Check out various insights and staggering statistics.
TupiTube is a free platform for kids and teenagers to express and to communicate visually, creating and sharing their first animated content from mobiles, tablets and computers, with an easy-to-use and fun experience.
We interviewed Mr. Gustav Gonzalez (CEO), Maefloresta Co. Check out the excerpts.
Hi Gustav, what was the idea behind creating TupiTube, a 2D animation tool?
First at all, Hi! And thank you for the interview. About TupiTube, in the early days it started as a free desktop solution for small Animation studios in Latin America.
That was the first approach. But as soon as we released the first version of the project, we started to get feedback from several school teachers around the globe telling us about the interesting potential of TupiTube in their classes to create 2D Animation videos, due its intuitive and easy-to-use interface. On the other hand, the feedback from studios was scarce, so we decided to start focusing on the younger users.
From that point, we discovered the huge potential of children and teenagers creating animations. Usually, kids consume a lot of animated content, but when you challenge them to create it, the results can be awesome.
When we started to understand the potential of animation in schools, we decided to change the goals of the project, so our vision became a long term dream:
- To introduce animation as a “making of” experience into the classroom as a pedagogic resource and as a fun communication channel.
- To prepare the next generations of digital artists for the animation industry.
What are your roles and responsibilities?
Currently, our startup is composed by three divisions:
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- Development team: In charge of the design and the implementation of all our software tools and resources in the diverse operating systems and platforms we work with.
- Commercial team: Focused on creating business, alliances and networking relationships around our value proposition, products and services.
- Marketing & Content team: In charge of making all our content production for our websites, our social networks, and our video channels. This team also represents our first line of support and communication with our users community.
How you came with the name ‘TupiTube’?
In Portuguese, Tupi is the name of the biggest indigenous tribe from Brazil. When we decided to found our startup formally, the name evolved to TupiTube.
We liked that name because it inspired our dream of becoming the most important repository of amateur animations, something like the “YouTube” for the younger artists.
Let us know in details about the major features of TupiTube.
The main goal of the TupiTube platform is to become the first animation experience for amateur artists; specially the younger. In that sense, all the features and the user interface what we implement are focused on to provide the easier and intuitive 2D Animation workflow for our target audience.
In this context, our desktop tool TupiTube Desk, provides the basic features and resources to work on four different techniques:
- Hand-drawing frame by frame animation
- Cut-Out animation
- Rotoscoping
- Stop Motion
Check out how TupiTube Desk works.
With regard to the mobile app, it’s only focused on frame by frame traditional animation, as the main goal of this tool is to introduce amateurs into the basic principles of animation, to help create amazing 2D Animation videos.
Understanding that animation is about fun (specially for us), the app has became an interesting communication tool for children and teenagers, something that we really enjoy as we consider than the “making of” animation experience must be part of the education process for the new generations.
Something important to remark about our development process is that it’s based on a strong relationship with our users community. Although our pending features list is continuously growing, we are always prioritizing the requests and the needs of all those amateur artists that email us every week.
Check out how TupiTube App works on Android mobile phone.
What are USPs of TupiTube?
As a product, the challenge of TupiTube is not about to provide the best tools to develop the most amazing 2D animation videos. Our challenge is about minimalism, it’s about how to deliver the minimum animation experience for those who try to create their first animated content without any previous reference of it.
How to design an intuitive experience with the minimum interface elements? That’s the endless goal that we are always trying to achieve from our R&D journey, every day.
So, what makes different TupiTube? Well, maybe that we are not pretending to surprise our users with overwhelming features, just to provide them an easy-to-use and fun first animation experience.
How many other softwares are supported?
As I mentioned before, our platform provides tools for desktop and mobile devices: TupiTube Desk and TupiTube App respectively. This is our current state-of-art implementation, but I would like to talk a little more about our route map and our middle term goals:
Currently we are exploring the possibility of developing other mobile apps focused on the diverse animation techniques. The more we research about it, the more we get excited about the endless possibilities related to create new digital art experiences, focused on our users community of 2D Animators.
I am absolutely convinced that our family of products is destined to keep growing along the time.
Let us know about various statistics of TupiTube.
Happily we can say that our users community covers the 5 continents. Our numbers are not stunning but they are interesting: during the last year TupiTube Desk has been downloaded around 60000 times and the mobile app is close to the 10000 downloads.
About monthly active users, on Desktop we have around 3000 and on Android, 1500. Every day around 600 videos are created with our tools from 40 countries, where USA and India use to be the places with more active users.
These numbers truly convince me that our proposal of value is covering a global need.
How do you decide contents of TupiTube Store?
Our TupiTube store aka virtual store is still a work-in-progress implementation, so there is a lot of products and experiments pending for execution for those young artists interested in to learn more and to enhance their experience with us of making 2D Animation videos. Currently, the content of the store is generated by our own digital artists but we expect to invite to all our users community to contribute with their own works as authors and providers of the store.
We dream of an endless repository with a huge set of categories and topics, full of digital goods and assets related to animation. Our store is just starting.
What is your business model?
Looking for giving open access to our tools for anyone wanting to learn about animation from the scratch, we are focusing our business model on two markets:
- Digital goods: As you noticed in the previous question, the store is an important channel for us to sale a diverse collection of digital assets.
- Training: The other part of our income is coming from our animation courses and workshops. For now, we are working on off-line services for schools and public institutions related to education but in the future, we expect to provide e-learning services too, so we can extend our training offer.
Of course, we are constantly exploring new business opportunities related to the “making of” animation experience, expecting to explode them in the middle term.
What are future plans for TupiTube?
I dream of TupiTube as a “de facto” standard for introducing the next generations into the art of animation and creation of 2D Animation videos.
This ambitious goal poses a new set of challenges for our team in any aspect of the company, because TupiTube is more than software, more than a digital platform; it’s in fact a community of young artists.
So, these are our priorities right now:
- We have to keep the hard work enhancing and releasing new versions of our current software solutions, but also, we have to optimize our development processes to support and to integrate new applications and services to our platform, looking for extending the animation experience we are delivering already.
- We have to create a huge amount of content for our store, for our animation training courses and for our social media channels as our users community is always demanding more tutorials, more videos, and more resources.
If you ask me, TupiTube is a living being, a living movement, so our plan in few words is to feed it with contents and technology to make it grow more, and more and more.
Enjoy amazing short film ‘Yuki’ by Anoek Terpstra, created using TupiTube.
The Virtual Assist thanks Mr. Gustav for this amazing interview and wishes best luck to the entire team of TupiTube and MaeFloresta. Keep helping young animators to create beautiful 2D Animation videos.