IF YOU CAN TYPE, YOU CAN MAKE MOVIES

At xtranormal.com, you can easily create animated movies and share them with your audience, friends, classroom or family. "Our revolutionary approach to movie-making builds on an almost universally held skill—typing. You type something; we turn it into a movie. On the web and on the desktop."

About: From the website:
"Xtranormal.com is a web-site powered by Xtranormal's text-to-movie™ platform—a web-based application used to create short 3D animated movies from simple text-based movie-scripts. The characters in the movie speak the dialogue in the script, and react to performance triggers—icons that are dropped directly into the script, just like smileys in IM/chat. Movies can be shared through e-mail, blogs and online video sharing and social networking sites such as YouTube™, MySpace™ and Facebook™ and Twitter."

The almost 9 million projects which are meant to be shared and re-mixed. Watch some of the projects on the Xtranormal YouTube channel. There is a robotic quality to the voice/audio but it doesn't seem to detract from the story and it seems to compliment the animation.

Good news for language teachers. Students can log in, create an account and use
English, French, Chinese, Italian, or Japanese. Again, I am surprised there's no Spanish here.

It's ridiculously easy to use. I sampled it with a silly one minute script. It takes a little while to render the video because it's higher quality than the preview. So, if the preview looks a bit pixelized don't worry.

FedFlix: Free Movies

FedFlix is a joint venture between the National Technical Information Service and Public.Resource.Org. 

They feature the best movies of the United States Government, from training films to history, from our national parks to the U.S. Fire Academy and the Postal Inspectors. These 258,000 + are browseable by author, title, keyword, subject, and collection. This is a part of the Internet Archive which also includes fun stuff like the Wayback Machine,
music archives, and textual archives.

"The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come."

All of these fine flix are available for reuse without any restrictions whatsoever. You are also invited to view or upload your videos to the Open Source collection! These thousands of videos were contributed by Archive users and community members. These videos are available for free download. It is suggested to "select a Creative Commons License during upload so that others will know what they may (or may not) do with with your video."

Browsing this collection is great fun. It definitely should be added to our library web reference collection.