Bored, and in a moderately curious frame of mind this morning, I found myself pretty much clicking every option of every website I use frequently (more than once a week) to see if anything of interest could be found. I searched and searched, to no avail. Then I noticed something rather interesting on the ‘My Videos’ section of YouTube. No no no, it wasn’t my videos; naturally they’re shit. What it was was a message, a quite discrete one at that, saying:
‘New! Animate your own story or create a video slideshow. Try it now’
And I think that you should, because honestly, if you just open up your mind a little bit and prepare to be childish for several hours, you’ll certainly be well entertained. Clicking the link will direct you to 3 different applications that allow you to make and publish videos directly to YouTube. All sounds pretty neat. And (apart from the 1st option which I haven’t tried yet) it is! Sort of. Apparently, each time you load the page, the 3 options are ordered differently, so there is no ‘1st option’. How peculiar. The choices are as follows:
Xtranornal was the first one I tried, of the two that I did try, and it really did keep me interested. Though the options were very limited (because of a pay for points system), there’s still a decent range in which you can make your video individual. The text-to-speech function is hilarious as always, and the animation of the characters isn’t too bad at all. The reason why being not too bad at all impresses me so much is because Xtranormal allows you to make 3D movies, and this was a very new experience for me. I of course do not mean stereoscopic (or even dodgy glasses dependant) 3D, but the characters themselves and the settings are rendered in 3D graphics, and it all looks pretty nice. However, I will add that the software is crippled by one recurring issue, and that’s the fact that no matter how hard you try, there’s just no way to make the movie flow fast and naturally. It’s horrifyingly ploddy, and awkwardly scripted. For me this was no problem, because I never took what I was doing seriously, and I loved the uneasy nature of the character’s (puerile) conversations, but for somebody with genuine aspirations, it’s a horrible problem to contend with. The other application I used was GoAnimate, which did much the same kind of thing, but in 2D with more options and a more complex editor tool. Needless to say, it wasn’t too difficult to get to grips with. I had a hell of a lot of fun with this one too; perhaps more so than Xtranormal, and that was down to the sheer scope I had to play with. Thought I ultimately went for the route of no planning and immaturity (I’m still such a pathetic child…), I knew that if I wanted to I could have a good stab at making a genuinely decent video with this application some time. Good stuff. It’s true that dedicating money to the cause will help you get the best out of these websites, but if like me, you’re a bit bored, and still have a portion of your brain actively devoted to childish humour, you really can’t go wrong with spending not money, but just some time on them.
If you’d like to check out the bollocks that I’ve been able to make with the aforementioned applications, then feel free to browse my profile at http://www.youtube.com/user/jenkinsMckenzie
The real recommendation I’d like to make here though, is to a series of videos that a user named ‘WoWZhen’ has created. There’s only a few of them, but they had me in absolute stitches. Please, if you only have time to look at one thing I’ve recommended, please let it be this guy’s videos. They tickled me to say the least. Do not by put off by the fact the series is called ‘The Gay Bodyguard of Death’, because these videos really do strike a very funny style of comedy. Starting off with #1 is probably the best idea… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkyuwwO6G-0
Oh, and happy Mother’s Day to all you mums out there (or indeed mums to be). I guess that should be Mothers’ Day, because I’m now not directing it only at my mother, so it’s a possessive plural…I JUST DON’T KNOW, OKAY?!
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