Storyblender, which recently launched in private beta, is a new casual animation platform that will appeal to users who want customized movies in a hurry. The site was a presenter at TechCrunch 40. If you’d like to try it out, you can grab one of 500 invites here.
The site is straightforward, which is a good thing because there doesn’t seem to be a tutorial yet. New users are presented with the video wizard that offers a number of pre-created movies that can be easily modified. Each movie is broken up along the bottom of the screen into brief scenes in a manner that will be familiar to anyone that has used a video editor like iMovie.
The site has hundreds of pre-rendered characters, backgrounds, music, and effects, which can be added to a scene by simply dragging and dropping. Nearly all of these have a distinctly comical look to them - the site doesn’t seem to offer “serious” movie making at this point. Instead, many of the backdrops and characters are better suited for video greeting cards (samples include “Party Time!“). Users can lend their own voices to clips, and they can import media from YouTube and Flickr. Members can share their movies with friends, who can modify them further if they wish.
Storyblender is competing with other animation sites like Fuzzwich, aniBoom, and JibJab.
Here’s one of the sample videos provided by the site:
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I take it that it was a joke when you said that this was on TechCrunch 40?
Peter
Not sure that showing this video is the best way to illustrate what StoryBlender does - there is an important link missing between content creation (with pictures, music, video) and content distribution (YouTube, websites, etc.) and not many tools enable users to create compelling “stories” with the content gathered or online.
Like Twitter and Seesmic, this kind of tool can evolve in many unexpected ways.
I don’t just want customized movies in a hurry, I want customized movies yesterday!
Can I use Storyblender too?
seems similar to xtranormal.com.
The proof is in the pudding.
The pudding doesn’t taste good from what I see.
Make a great pudding and then bring it on…
it looks good for video greeting card.
you can send it in private mode dubbing your voice like ” I love you” or ” happy birthday ”
i like this.