As F. Scott Fitzgerald always used to say, you never really know if your latest short story is any good until you get a terrifying cartoon character to read it back to you in a dead, un-inflected robot voice.

The process is called "text-to-movie," and the good people at "www.xtranormal.com" have created a website that allows you to make little 3-D cartoons for free, using a simple text editor and icon boxes.

Here's something I whipped up in an hour, a film version of a short story I wrote last year called "My Summer Vacation":



The website is free to use, easy as hell to master, and lets you use several different skins to tell your tales, from fucked-up lookin' robots to strange, colorless office workers. There's an upper limit of around fifteen hundred words for every film, but you can make a series if you want to keep going.

You can either pick one actor or two to tell your tale. Soon, people are gonna be sending each other "text-to-movie" love letters, "text-to-movie" death threats, and "text-to-movie" pornographies. "Text-to-movie" promotional advertisements are gonna crop up on your favorite websites.

Xtranormal's mission statement:

"Xtranormal's mission is to bring movie-making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies. Movie-making, short and long, online and on-screen, private and public, will be the most important communications process of the 21st century.

"Our revolutionary approach to movie-making builds on an almost universally-held skill -- typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop."

Text-to-movie! Every hack's dream and nightmare! Instant gratification! Instant obscurity! Lookit them little cartoons talk! Holy fucking shit!

(Thanks to TODDCOBB and Uncle Staple for the tip!)

Posted by miracle on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:35:16 -0400 -- permanent link