One of the more exciting companies I’ve come across recently is Xtranormal. It’s a great example of where I see the future of entertainment going.
Movies have been digital for a while, but Xtranormal moves the entire creation process into the digital realm. Newspapers went fully digital with the Internet and look what it did for them. I’d expect even more for movies.
People’s first foray into scripted movies is usually as part of a class project. Going through the motions you quickly learn how incredibly time consuming it all is. Your friends, now actors, are difficult to organize let alone direct. Having a script would be helpful but most people start without one. The biggest lesson you learn is that re-shoots and last minute edits take up more time than shooting the original footage. It simply isn’t an easy medium to work with and in the end you settle on something far below your original vision.
Edit and re-shoot in real time
Being fully digital changes much of that. With Xtranormal the actors are completely virtual, using text to speech for their dialogue. Even the camera and editing can be automated. You can build a film in less than a minute. Granted the text to speech is still a little rough and there are only a limited set of characters and sets, but the technology will only improve with time and what you gain can be much more powerful. For one, you can all but do away with those pesky re-shoots – you can create a movie in real time if you’d like.
Open source movies
Xtranormal also enables you to set a movie as being open – open for others to cut, remix, do whatever they’d like with your original work. That’s taking fan fiction to a whole new level and truly powering mass amateurization as defined by Clay Shirky.
Movies as a continuous evolving product
Editing movies in real time also changes the concept of a finished product. Think of a movie being in Beta. With edits and re-shoots being this easy it’s possible to also employ continuous deployment and continuous learning as advised by Eric Ries and his Lean Startup methodology. Think of split-testing not just a new ending, but a single line of dialogue. Truly the movie itself becomes a continuously evolving product.
It’s all about the level of content
I’ve seen other similar tools like GoAnimate but none use text to speech and the 3D aspect certainly puts Xtranormal a step above. That said however, Xtranormal will succeed or fail based on the level of content created with the tool. There are only a limited set of characters and sets to choose from so you’re story will be pretty confined to talking heads but with a little creativity I’m sure you can work around that and the roughness of the text to speech. I just started a project to try and experiment with interactive story using Xtranormal, hopefully others will start experimenting with it as well.
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