User:Nisha singh/My sandbox/Content-E-learning tools/Xtranormal

5.3 Movie Making Software- Xtranormal

'Xtranormal’s tagline "If you can type, you can make movies." is quite catchy and speaks the truth.' Movies/ Videos are very attractive and are attention capturing in course authoring endeavors. One of the software which helps you to create a story is Xtranormal. It helps you create amazing interactive stories on the concept or ideas you want to covey to others. Xtranormal is a website which hosts text-to-speech based computer animated videoclips, featuring animated three-dimensional characters. It helps people to be content-creators. You can log into the site to create videos by scripting the dialog and choosing from a menu of camera angles and predesigned characters and scenes. You can work online or download it free on Desktop (currently in Beta), and run offline. Xtranormal's animation software was launched by Chris Albrecht in 2008. It was originally intended to help filmmakers to produce storyboard. It was made popular when satires of workplace misbehavior about a cellphone salesman, went viral.  In 2010, director J. Roland Kelly made a short film titled “Sleeping with Charlie Kaufman” using  Xtranormal. Xtranormal is extremely easy to use and provides a selection of template backgrounds and animations for you from TV studios to workplace and soccer pitches.

Steps
 * First you need to sign-up for an account which takes just a few seconds.
 * select the background and actors for your production.
 * drag and drop movie elements (expressions, animations, sounds and more) onto the script.
 * Dialog lines, which the actors can "read" in several languages, are also inserted right away on the script. It also gives you an option to record your voice.
 * You may preview your work so far, by clicking on the "Preview" button.

Xtranormal had started as a completely free tool and has converted to a somewhat pay for points format (previews are still free ) It is offering both an education and business platform in its subscription model. Though it started its journey as free tool. Xtranormal for Education A teacher has to buy credit as shown in the picture and logs in. Subscriptions cost $10 for a teacher per month and $0.50 for each student again per month. "Pay only what you need" is the motto for this plan, and on one hand, the thought of getting only exactly what you need is attractive. They will find it easy to use dashboard where one can create classes and students enroll in their class by paying the prescribed amount. Once a class is setup, one can create a new project, assignments, quizzes, lectures for the students. It will be automatically be available to all of the students in those classes. What this means is that when a student logs into their Xtranormal account, the student will see the new assignment and can begin creating their movie right away.