There are loads of new tools that make it easy for anyone to create really slick broadband storytelling experiences and share them online. The quality and sophistication of these was previously available only to those with expert knowledge and resources, like media owners. Now, sophisticated animation and custom video creations are within reach for non-experts. It’s the next chapter of an accelerating process of media democratisation that started with cheap digital cameras and photo-sharing, YouTube and blogging. The newer tools are significantly more impressive than RockYou-style Facebook and MySpace bling. Here are three examples:
Make your own music video
Billed as “The end of slideshows”, Animoto Productions have developed a web application that automatically generates professionally produced music videos using what they call “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology” that “thinks like an actual director and editor”.
You upload some photos and chose some music and Animoto’s technology makes you a pretty good music video that you can send, download or embed. Imagine, a machine that replaces an actual director and editor. Wow. Short ones are free but you pay for full-length versions.
Star in your own animation
The JibJab Brothers have been around for a long time doing Flash-based parodies of politicians and companies.
Jumping aboard the digital share-cropping participatory media bandwagon in 2006, they created JokeBox, described as a “trading hub for the funniest videos, photos, audio jokes and text jokes on the web” (has delivered well over 300 million jokes), and monetised the service through advertising. In October 2007, they launched Sendables - a paid-for service that allows makes it dangerously easy to upload an image, cut out the head and animate the mouth, add it to a pre-made animation and send it. It’s ‘Elf Yourself‘ taken to the next level.
Make a personalised video game
If you had a family Christmas like mine, you might want to make a ‘Sniper’ game where you can upload your Christmas photos, crop the heads out and shoot ‘em up. Pictogames makes this simple. Pictogames offers an extensive menu of Flash games to personalise, including Mole Bashing, delightful Zit Popping, Singing and Dancing and Arm Wrestling. There’s also a community where users are rating and commenting on each others games (and beta testing new game concepts in a “Labs” area), and the company is releasing a developer API that should accelerate the number of new games released. Pictogames is currently the least creatively sophisticated of the three but it’s open , community-supported model is aimed at the masses and looks more scalable.
On one level, you could dismiss these services as toys, trifles and playthings, but the combination of extreme ease-of-use and rapidly increasing sophistication also point to new ways in which amateurs will soon acquire more powerful storytelling tools. Many will use them to, well, ‘whack-a-mole’ but a tiny number will use them to tell their own stories, and this will continue to present both challenges and opportunities to big media and brands. Just look at the Alexa traffic graph below for the 2007/8 ElfYourself.com (thanks Fred Wilson), or consider the fact that JibJab’s ‘2007 Year in Review‘ animation was viewed over 3 million times. A touching, inspiring and deeply serious example of how people are already using Animoto to tell their own stories can be found here.
Surely, we are not too far from being able to upload our own photos and stories into something as sophisticated as The Whale Hunt, and to create our own powerful (and dynamic) documentaries. Obviously, the skills required for storytelling cannot all be ‘built in’ to these platforms (the photos used in The Whale Hunt are extremely beautiful and we can’t all just nip up to the Arctic Circle and hang out with the Inuits on a hunt) but an increasing number of them can be. The barriers are certainly getting lower, and to make a big difference they only really have to be *low enough*.
Loading ...
I just came across...
Post a comment