Making Popcorn!

An online tool to make more dynamic video clips 

This online tool would appear to not only have significant potential to make videos more dynamic, but is also great fun to experiment with! Mozilla Popcorn Maker is an online tool that makes it possible to combine video with content pulled directly from the web including everything from text, links and maps to pictures and live feeds. The creators’ aim was to take “video beyond the box” citing that the only change in videos after a decade on the web has been the size of the box and the quality of the picture!

Popcorn Maker is free to use and claims to work in all browsers (although my web browser apparently “lacks some functionality expected by Popcorn Maker to function properly”!). Working with timelines just as you do when editing video, web events are pulled into the timeline as opposed to clips.

For example, you can include a live feed from Flickr by dragging the Flickr option into the timeline and it will pull in images off the web according to the selected tags. As it is a live feed, it will be different every time you access the video. Other options to include on the timeline, and therefore in the video clip, are Google Maps, Wikipedia, pop-ups, Twitter and images.

In short, it means that videos created like this can work just like the web; dynamic, full of links and completely remixable.  Definitely worth a look! To see some examples of what can be done or to take a tutorial, go to the Popcorn Maker website.