Jordi Romkema

The Nickelodeon Cartoon Creator is an interactive application where kids can create their own Spongebob Squarepants. They are literally the director of their own cartoon: they decide on the story, how the characters will be animated, what the set looks like, what background music is playing and much more.

The kids can edit and customize their cartoon, save it and come back later to work on it again. If they’re happy they can decide to publish their cartoon online. This will send the cartoon to Nickelodeon for moderation because every cartoon must be checked for explicit content first. When this is done the cartoon can be seen online and they can send it to their friends.

The Cartoon Creator is entirely made in Flash/Actionscript. The cartoons aren't actualy saved as cartoons or movie files, instead the keyframes are saved into an XML file. So everytime you view a cartoon it needs to be build up from the XML data. This has the advantage that resources used in the cartoons such as characters can be swapped by newer version anytime whereas regular movie files are static.

Pest of the West

From March 17th until April 9th Nickelodeon held special Spongebob Squarepants weeks with new episodes every weekend in order to promote a special new episode: Spongebob and the Pest of the West where he finds out that he’s a distant family member of a real western hero. The Cartoon Creator was also expanded so that kids could create their own western themed Spongebob cartoon with different cowboy and western attributes and special western music. The top 20 best cartoons were aired on Nickelodeon. These cartoons were dubbed by the real voices of Spongebob Squarepants. The top 5 cartoons were aired around the Pest of the West episode and the creators won special Nickelodeon prizes.

One of the cartoons the kids made that was aired on Nickelodeon

In the future the Cartoon Creator will be expanded with more characters from different Nickelodeon series.

First concept sketch when the project was still called Toonimator

A more evolved Cartoon Creator compared to the concept sketch, however this was still using an old color scheme. As you might notice, some buttons where replaced or moved after a usability test with kids.