August 28th, 2011

I made a tiny movie!

I think everyone’s heard of Xtranormal now. Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably seen one of those very static movies with people bantering in robot voices–those are done on Xtranormal. It’s a very tempting site for those of us who think it would be a fun to make a movie but don’t know how, and don’t want to invest the many hours necessary to learn.

All you do on this site is choose a basic setting, some characters’ bodies (well, 1 or 2–they can’t do more than that [yet]) and feed in your dialogue. You can make pauses, and some small gestures/facial expressions, but basically, it’s people standing around talking to each other.

A major criticism of my work might be that there’s too much of people standing around talking to each other, so I thought this site would be perfect for me. Bonus, I realized when I started making my film, that stilted robot voices are perfect for rendering awkward office talk, which is a major component of the dialogue in my book. Still, it was trickier than anticipated–I am really not a playwright, and a lot of my dialogue doesn’t make sense without the surrounding narrative, or at least more detailed action than Xtranormal is really capable of (yet).

So I’m not sure how great my movie is–it’s sort of…stilted and static. I was conceiving of it as a little book trailer (23 days and counting until launch!) as you’ll be able to tell by the bits of cover bumpf I’ve put on the intertitles. But as I say, it came out oddly, so I don’t know if it’s a great marketing device.

And yet, I sort of like it–maybe you will too? It’s only 2 minutes long! Please take a look.

If you love it, hate it, are indifferent to it, or have some Xtranormal usage tips you wish to impart, please let me know. I have some leftover $$ on the site (you have to pay for things in points, which you buy in bundles of more than you need–annoying) so I could maybe make another, better video later on. In case this one isn’t already awesome, I mean.