Happy Valentine’s Day!

Speaking of subject changes, I used a couple of different storytelling tools this week. Here are my thoughts on them.

I. 30Hands

For the narrated slideshow, I used 30Hands. I didn’t really choose to do a narrated slideshow, though, I just went to 50+ Ways to Tell a Story and chose the first one in the alphabetical list. That, ladies and germs, is how decisions get made.

I really liked 30Hands because it’s super easy to use. Searching and saving images is easier on a tablet than a smartphone (mostly because of the typing you have to do to search for the correct image; for example, “sassy tiger”). It took literally seconds to figure out the interface. It gives you the option of publishing to their site, then embedding, or creating an mp4 movie to download (I think it has a commercial for the app at the end).

The only problem I had was that the embed code didn’t work. I’ve had this from sites before, where something from a site other than Youtube won’t embed properly on WordPress (the free sites, I mean). That was kind of a pain.

So I downloaded the mp4 and uploaded it to Youtube, which totally worked. The workaround was mostly painless, but I still would have loved it if the embed worked straight up on the blog, though.

II. Animoto

The Animoto video was super cool—things move all over the place! Wow! I was really happy with the video itself, although the text manipulation was a little constraining. Not a lot of room for words and tons of space on the screen. It’s possible that I just didn’t spend enough time learning how to use it right; but in an hour or so of tooling around on this and some other vids, it wasn’t immediately apparent how to increase the amount or control the size of the text.

I encountered the exact same problem as with 30Hands—the embed code from Animoto’s site didn’t work, so I had to export to Youtube first. I’m starting to wonder what story-making apps and sites won’t have this easy port to Youtube, and whether they’ll show up on my WordPress site, and how frustrated I’ll be by having a link to a story instead of having the story in the post.