Webkinz Studio

Webkinz Studio

Kind

Flash program for making animated shows

Stored at

SWF/VIEWS/TVSTUDIO/

Webkinz Studio is a Flash program from Webkinz with which a player put together a short animated show using two actors, a set and typed lines. Its files use three names for it: the folder is TVSTUDIO, and the text speaks of "Webkinz Studio", the "Webkinz Movie Studio" and "your own TV show". With 102 files it is the largest entry for Webkinz in the Flashpoint Archive.

Making a show

The program's help text gives the steps. The player first chooses music, a background and a sky, and gives the show a title. Two "action figures" are chosen as actors, and the one dragged into the first film box becomes Actor 1. For each scene the player picks an emotion and an action from menus and types what the actor says. Lines were checked against a list of words that were not allowed.

An Advanced mode, reached by clicking a film strip, gave control over scene transitions, the actors' entrances and exits and their positions. The entrances and exits named in the text are "Walk forward", "Pop up from below", "Slide in from side", "Walk backwards", "Duck below" and "Slide out from side", and the transitions include wipes in four directions.

Saving, actors and sets

Finished shows were saved in numbered slots, and a saved show could be played, edited or deleted. The text invites the player to "Add new Actors or Sets to your collection!", and its error messages show that actors and sets were things kept in the player's dock: an actor or set that could not be added "has been placed back into your dock", and no more than two of one actor could be in the studio.

Files

Beside the main program the entry holds 28 numbered folders of actors, each with a char.swf and a photo.swf, and 17 numbered pairs of backgrounds in folders named bgTop and bgBot. None of these holds readable names, so the actors and sets cannot be identified from text. The files do not say who made the program or when.