Playing with xtranormal's 3-D movie creator

One of the companies I loved at DEMO 08 last year, and haven't heard much from since their demonstration is xtranormal, which pitched the idea of letting users create 3-D movies based on text. I happened to come across their site recently, so signed up for a free account and created a short "newscast" based on the script from our daily news podcast.

The service lets you choose from a number of different "actors", and you can make your movie with one or two actors. You can also choose from a variety of background "sets", and add music in the background or ambiance sounds.

The dialog is typed into a script area, and you can drag-and-drop icons into the script that include different camera angles, or directions for your actors (animations, facial expressions, etc.). You can preview your movie - it's called rehearsal - and then when you're finished (you can save along the way), you can publish the movie to the xtranormal site (it can be made public or private). You can also publish the movie to Youtube, or embed it into another page (as I have done).

Obviously, the more work you do on the different camera angles, etc., will produce a better movie. It took me about 20 minutes to create my movie, and I'm still not 100% satisfied. The robotic voice quality is good, but not super-awesome. I could fix some things by writing out words and acronyms, but there are still some cadence issues that I'd like to see fixed. But that's just a minor quibble.

The point is to have fun, and the service has accomplished this. If you have the time to fool around with the tools, you can make some pretty cool movies.

The service is currently in beta, and you get to play with a lot of actors and sets that may get closed off to premium users (accounts will start at $4.95 per month) at some point, so enjoy those while you can. The company also says that a desktop movie creator client is also coming soon.

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