popular dishes. Small businesses build product demos and video holiday cards. Professional photographers create animated portfolios for their websites.
Sometimes businesses like the high-energy styles such as “The Arena,” and other times they want understated, minimalist styles that will highlight their content. In this vein, Animoto worked with a portrait photographer named Tamara Lackey to create a bright style called “Innocence” that consists mostly of Ken Burns zooms on a white background with fade-to-white transitions. “This one is calming, but we also want to be able to get you excited,” Jefferson says. “We should be able to tap into the range of emotions.”
Animoto will “keep pushing the innovation envelope,” Jefferson says, coming up with new styles that take advantage of the latest trends in motion-graphics design. It also wants to do more to help users with the work that comes before and after the actual creation a video—what a commercial studio would call pre-production, post-production, and distribution.
That might mean providing tools that make it easier to gather, review, and select source materials for videos. It might also mean making it easier for users to share Animoto videos and measure who’s watching them. “Where we are really good right now is in the creation part, but where we need to help consumers and businesses is with the other pieces,” Jefferson says. “We feel like we have to own the whole value chain.”
I’ll check back with Animoto in a year or two and let you know how much progress they’ve made.
The following is a selection of videos created by Animoto’s business users.
