SONG CONTEST BLOG

Animoto, the ultra slideshow-to-music creation service and one of my favourite properties for music marketing, announced last Thursday that the company has raised a second round of funding from Madrona Venture Group to the tune of $4.4 million.  Animito boasts 750,000 registered users, 10% of which are premium, as well as a Facebook application installed by 2 million users and iPhone application with a modest 300,000.

Updating fans after a gig with photos of the night, providing them with screenshots of album artwork prior to a new release, and adding on-the-fly visuals to a streaming track can boost your engagement with your audience…  if you can do all that quickly, easily and preferably for free.

With that in mind, I searched for a tool that will allow me to create a short clip in under a minute (not including upload and render time which doesn’t count because I can do other things while I’m waiting) that’s more compelling than a slideshow and less cumbersome than a video.  With Animoto, I export my images from Flickr, MySpace, Facebook etc. (or upload directly from my desktop), put the images in order, add text, and upload my soundtrack.  Animoto will ‘animate’ the image sequence to match the musical qualities of my track, render the video, and provide me with a variety of options to post or share the finished clip with my friends, fans and family.  It’s a three step process.  A 30 second sequence is free and literally takes a minute to do.

As soon as you get off the stage, use Animoto to create and a send a quick audiovisual cut so the folks that attended the gig have something to look at (and remember you by) when they get home.  You can get pretty creative without the skill-set or labor attributed to video recording and editing.

Stop motion video editing is popular on YouTube.  I first got sight of its viral potential when young Lasse Gjertsen uploaded his outrageous piano and drum montage:

More recently, Oren Lavie enjoyed tremendous success beyond his YouTube exposure with a beautifully conceived yet shoe-string budgeted piece:

Yesterday, I discovered a symphony of YouTube clips that, collectively, sound quite amazing and reflect the exciting prospects of remixing previously published and shared content: