Text-to-movie platform enables clients to make animation videos

Four months after being named as the best show at Digital Media Summit, one of Hollywood’s oldest conferences on digital media, Montreal-based Xtranormal Inc. finally unveiled an innovative text-to-movie platform that allows users to make animated movies and share them with friends. Xtranormal.com allows users with no animation experience to make movies through simple web-based tools. The platform’s compatibility with such popular social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook enables users to share animated movies worldwide. “Our motto is if you can type you can make a movie,” says Jean-Francois Deschenes, general manager, web operations. Users first have to log onto Xtranormal.com, where they can choose a template containing 65 to 80 characters. They then type in the script or words they want the characters to speak, and choose their surrounding environment, such as a school, church, or playground. A sound file also creates ambiance and special effects. Users can pick from any of the 15 languages available. If the choice is English, accents from around the English-speaking world abound. Users can then play back the animated video they have created, edit and share it with others. The ensuing manipulation of the characters enables the creation of animated profiles, newscasts, talk shows, and movie clips. Deschenes says it took the Montreal-based tech company two years to perfect the platform. In June it was showcased at the Digital Media Summit in Hollywood where judges named it as the “best show.” Michael Stroud, chair of Digital Media Summit, said the “deceptively simple program was a great example of how the hottest tech companies today are enabling users to create their own online content.” The platform is expected to generate revenue through business-to-consumer and business-to-business applications. Deschenes says the animation platform can be used as a teaching tool to convey messages such as FAQs to customers as well as e-learning, where it is embedded in courses taught through the web. “The beauty is that it is so easy to transform whenever the course changes. If you need to do it, you just go into the text and change it, and you don’t need to know any coding to do that,” says Deschenes. Placing a finger on how much the business-to-business application can generate in revenues is still difficult to determine. “It is very hard to evaluate but right now we have some good deals on the table that I can’t talk about,” he says. Other revenue opportunities include sponsored channels on its site and product placement. Currently, there are characters on the platform who are dressed in branded apparel. The site is currently free, but soon clients will be charged 50 cents to access a more sophisticated platform with better voice quality and features. By next year Xtranormal expects the platform will be self-sufficient, generating $1,500,000 in annual revenues.

Text-to-movie platform enables clients to make animation videos

News | 10/15/2008 3:52 pm EDT

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