As described in the blog post on the party itself, the offices look like they're right out of a sci-fi movie. You know, the kind where the scientist is this young, cool, hipster cat. That's Animoto's SF digs, and Jefferson's office.
His office carries the theme too: it's entirely glassed in, and reminds you of those experiments where the person's locked into a room without any connection with the outside World except that you can look in on him. But it's also a place where Jefferson can see what's happening in the office without leaving his bubble.
Bubble aside, we talked about Animoto.
"There's four of us that co-founded the company. The inspiration was about how you get really high quality video to the masses. So, instead of using (video) editing tools, how do you have them just point to their photos, pick a song, and have it done for them. Something they'd just really be proud to share. Almost like a movie trailer of your photo album. One of the key parts of that," Brad said, "was Stevie Clifton, our CTO."
"He was working as a lead animator for ABC's documentary group. In that role he was trying to figure out how to automate his job. How to do some of the real heavy lifting that real animators have to do, in an automated manner. A lot of us grabbed on to that, and said 'that's great for you, but if we could make this a mass-market kind of thing, that would be a big idea. So that's what we quit our jobs for."
The Future Of Animoto
Brad says that the ability to see photos in the way Animoto allows is "pretty jarring" to some, and leads to a lot of possible applications for the future, though he did not explain what those would be.
Copyright Issues?
With all of the photos one can use to create a video using Animoto, you'd think there would be a number of users that ran up against copyright issues. Jefferson explains that's not the case because the terms of service "explicitly state that you cannot use copyrighted material, so we haven't had that much of a problem." That's a cool way of saying the users follow the Animoto rules.
Animoto Roll-outs
On February 8th, right after the Super Bowl, Animoto will roll out its new website with an improved "user experience," and introduce an ability to access HD quality so you can view videos on your digital television at home. Also, Brad says the time that it takes you to get your videos is going to be "reduced drastically."