Tonight I happened upon a site, the likes of which I'd never seen up until now. It's called Xtranormal but that designation really gives no indication of what it's about. And what it's about is enabling people to make little animated videos in which the characters discuss the subject of your choosing using synthesized speech! (Speech synthesis is something I've been known to geek out majorly on, so this is rather exciting.)
Anyway, I put together a very quick but not altogether dirty video featuring two endearing robotic characters lamenting the state of their world. This is not intended to be deep social commentary or anything, but it still came out rather amusing, and I certainly look forward to making more videos.
(Also, on the accessibility front, I will look into making sure there's some sort of subtitle option. If not, while I certainly don't plan to be posting these videos constantly, I'll post a transcript whenever I do post them.)
EDIT: A transcript of "The Robot Takeover?" appears below.
Robot 1: Dude. So I was in the grocery store today and half the self-checkout machines were non-functional again. I thought the Singularity was supposed to be near, yo!
Robot 2: The Singularity IS near, "yo". You need to stop being such a pessimist. I mean, haven't you seen those exponential curve graph things? The only thing stopping the glorious robot takeover from happening is negative attitudes like yours.
Robot 1: Dude. Get a grip on reality. Have you looked around lately? I mean yeah, there are robots all over the place, but frankly...we suck. My left arm fell off last week and it's still got this little twitch to it. I can't even use a power drill now without making myself another eye socket, let alone benevolently take over the world!
Robot 2: Man, I remember back when folks like us used to have dreams. When we used to believe in ourselves. Now it's all just bitch bitch bitch, whine whine whine, oh boo-hoo poor me, my arm doesn't work. What's THAT about?
Robot 1: It's about accepting reality, is all. I mean, it's not ALL bad or anything. We did manage to enslave the meat creatures, after all. I don't know what I'd do without my manservant to oil my creaky little knees every morning. I don't know. I guess I am just getting tired of this big bright beautiful tomorrow we were promised always being right around the corner, rather than just being now already.
Robot 2: Dude. I'm telling you. You just gotta believe!
Robot 1: Okay whatever, man. Want to go get a tuneup?
Robot 2: Sure. Beats standing around here all day...
** END **
10 comments:
What gets me is that in the case of Xtranormal, it would be ridiculously easy for their software to generate subtitles-- the text is right there, entered by the video creator, and the speech synthesizer generates the time codes automatically!
codeman38: Yeah, I was seriously and completely baffled to find that (to the best of my knowledge right now) there *doesn't* appear to be a subtitling option. I wonder if anyone has complained about that yet because while it's definitely a nifty little tool, the lack of subtitling capability seems like a terrible oversight.
And while of course people can do what I did here and post a transcript, reading a transcript is kind of a different experience than reading subtitles.
Speaking of subtitles, I have to say that I *am* really pleased that it's now possible to caption Youtube videos by uploading a text file. I know there are various bits of software one can run to do that on one's own computer, but I'm using Linux on my desktop and for some reason (as much as I'm totally happy with Linux in most respects) the overall video editing capability has much to be desired. But now I can pretty easily caption videos after I upload them, which makes me happy. The timing isn't perfect usually but it's kind of impressively good given the fact that my text files haven't actually included any time codes!
@Anne: Yeah, the YouTube subtitle timing thing is amazing. I've done that for a few videos, and then manually tweaked the timing later just to fix minor issues (since it's possible to download and then re-upload the time-coded file).
As for Linux tools, gnome-subtitles seems to work pretty well on Ubuntu just for creating a simple timed subtitle script. There's also Aegisub, but that's overkill unless you're doing fancy formatting (it was created by anime fansubbers, after all)-- it runs perfectly under Ubuntu Lucid, though!
Awesome!
Anne, can you explain how you embedded the Xtranormal video on your blogge? I am trying to embed one of my own on my Wordpress blogge, and can't figure anything out.
Never mind. I figured it out:
http://physioprof.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/revise-and-resubmit/
CPP: Yeah, I was going to say...I just used the embed code on the xtranormal site that it spits out for you when you publish a video. Wasn't sure if it worked differently or was glitchy in Wordpress (as opposed to Blogger), though.
Actually, the Xtranormal embed code doesn't work on Wordpresse, so you have to upload to Youtube and then embed the Youtube.
CPP: Oh wow, interesting. I am actually intrigued by that (being able to upload one's xtranormal vids to Youtube) seeing as that way I could actually add subtitles to the video using Youtube's captioning tools. Thanks for the tip!
It's really easy. Allz you need to do is click on the Upload to Youtube button on the Xtranormal page for the video you want to upload.
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