XtraNormal

TechCrunch ran a story about a BestBuy guy who appears to have some trouble because of an actually quite funny video where a sales guy tries to sell a HTC phone to a iPhone die-hard. It cranked up more than 1.6M views on YouTube. The movie was made through a site called XtraNormal, where you can edit a movie with CG character animations, and have the voices inserted through text-to-speech conversion. XtraNormal subsequently overloaded, as everyone tried to make videos now. The site is still quite slow and in parts not really functioning (e.g. no preview), but it is fun nevertheless. I did my own movie within a few minutes, see below. The site makes money by charging for "premium" assets, like better models or other extra editor capabilities. Their MS Windows software STATE to create the videos is much more powerful than the web app, but the PC version crashes very very frequently - no ready for prime time. The short clip below is a play on Marvin, and introduces the blog in a Marvin-way.