Animanifestos
I like this neologism from Chris Coldewey: He calls the short, type-heavy, idea-rich videos that are used, more and more, to explain products and services “animanifestos.” Here’s one example.
As one of those people who often likes title sequences better than the movies they introduce, I like this trend a lot. It’s also very Rise of the Image, Fall of the Word—except (of course) the word isn’t falling out of the picture, it’s falling in to the video frame. Words spinning and dancing, bumping up into pictures, emphasizing (or contradicting!) the voice-over track… mmm, good stuff. More animanifestos, please.
To answer one question Chris poses in his post: This kind of animation is still mostly done in Adobe After Effects, but I think the field is wide-open for something more mass-market. Some new iMovie to After Effects’ Final Cut Pro. Prezi could grow to meet this need, if they made the tool a lot more flexible—so it was built for making media, not just giving presentations.
I agree — it’s mostly After Effects now. I mentioned Prezi in a comment on the Animanifesto post, remembering I’d seen it here, but there is a big gulf between them. Whatever this new mass-market idea-articulater turns out to be, it will be part of the software tools pack accompanying the New Liberal Arts — the New Office Suite!
OMG, New Office. Love. it.
* After Effects/Prezi hybrid of the future—with great support for data! You’re so right about that.
* Photoshop
* Final Cut Express
* Something that helps you quickly develop & deploy web apps… maybe a simpler version of Coda? Or maybe it’s online, like Wufoo.
* What else?
Googlesketchup, multivariable data exploration suite (the engine behind the PRezi)–maybe Spotfire or Mathematica, Basecamp to manage correspondence and projects, a GIS package.
I haven’t read “The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word” since it was released but it was transformative in my thinking that technology didn’t have to mean the end of writing/reading. Whenever I recommended it to friends they thought I was advocating for the end of reading!
The BBC did a series of shorts (that I’ve been unable to find) that ran between programs in the nineties — poets reading their own works over a video of a book open on a chair. Some of the key phrases would appear onscreen, or scroll across or fade in and out — trying to reach the general public with how _lively_ poetic images and phrasings could be.
If this is what one generation had to suffer through endless, shoddy powerpoints to learn to create, I salute their sacrifice.
* An emulator system to ensure you can Rosetta Stone your long-discarded filetypes from the past into existence again.
* A self-stats package emerging out of the Quantified Self/Fitbit/Enjoymentland/RescueTime circles.
* Some kind of packrat app for squirreling away bits of info and accessing it again — Yojimbo/Evernote-esque.
* A better Batchbook/Highrise-ish app — I’m always struck by how dead and static my Address Book is. Shouldn’t it be reminding me who to ping, and that it’s been a few weeks now?
* Writeroom for blocking everything else out to just create text, old school.