Stirring Up the Dust

From Ewan McIntosh’s blog post of August 17th, I learned of the launching of Animoto.  Ewan stated that Animoto “provides a funky alternative way to view and listen to slideshows.”  Now, I like slideshows, but in times past slideshows have taken WAAAAAY too long to create.  Maybe I was just technologically impaired, but I found it not worth the trouble most of the time.  I decided to give Animoto a look and see what made it funky.  My first thoughts were “What is Animoto all about?”  Their website answered the question.

What is Animoto?

Animoto is a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced in widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic A.I. technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills and techniques that are used in television and film. The technology takes into account every nuance of a song: the genre, song structure, energy, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocals. Whether it’s punk, pop, hip-hop or a classical Stravinsky piece, every Animoto video is totally customized. Even videos generated with an identical set of images and music will each have a completely distinct set of motion design. No two videos are the same. They can be emailed, and embedded in pages on websites including social network sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Now that’s a lot of technical talk just to say “we’re a really easy tool that can be used to create some neat short videos.”  Honestly, I spent about 10 minutes learning the process.  I took me one try to get it right.  After that, I could make a short video with about 12 pics in less than five minutes. It was really exciting!  The first video I made was one with student pictures.  I hope to put it on our school website, but I’m waiting on parental consent.  My next thought was that I needed to put one of these videos on my media center website.  So, rather than use students, I took pictures of the room itself and made my video.  I’m going to post it here for you to see.  I wanted to make one with pictures of my children and post it here instead, but their grandmother was a little phobic about me posting their pictures.  Go figure!

 Anyway, my final thoughts on the matter are…try it!  What have you got to lose?

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