From The Guys at Animoto

It’s often times difficult for our team to express why we think Animoto matters. We’ll happily talk your ear off about the geeky things like how it works or what it’s for but the ‘why’ is a tougher question.

On January 2nd we received an email from Aaron H. that gave us a sense for why he thinks Animoto matters (published below with Aaron’s permission). It’s stories like this that make us really proud of what we’re doing. Thank you Aaron, Eli and family!

From: Aaron H.
Date: Jan 2, 2008 4:35 PM
Subject: From a big fan
To: ANIMOTO <theguys@animoto.com>

I just wanted to share with you another way in which animoto is being used. If you’ll take the time to read this, you’ll see that your service isn’t just “cool”, but it really helps people.

My three year old son, Eli, was diagnosed with an advanced stage of Neuroblastoma at the end of June 2007. This was obviously devastating to all of us, including his friends and family, and everyone was constantly asking about Eli and how he was doing while we were being treated in our home hospital in Iowa. I started keeping track of his progress on www.carepages.com (Carepage name: EliRHorn) and over 700 friends and family have signed up to track Eli’s progress. The popular thing to do when your kid has cancer is to put together a video with lots of pictures and music. However, one problem with that is that they are typically incredibly sad and depressing. I did one and posted it on YouTube (specifically only using pictures before treatment when he became thin and bald), but my wife wouldn’t even watch it.

I wanted to do a video of Eli with pictures FROM his treatment, but didn’t want something so sad and depressing again. Then I came across animoto.com. With the sweet video transitions and choices from upbeat (and appropriate and fitting) music, I knew I had struck gold. I put together a video montage using pictures from Eli’s hospital experiences using an upbeat song from my college band’s first CD and it was a huge hit.

http://animoto.com/play/592e41d2a89cbfa5f59629f5d6e79c60

Due to the ability to embed HTML in the CarePage update, hundreds of people enjoyed the video and commented how amazing it was. Even my wife loved it! Now with the ability to download in MP4 format, I was able to put it on Eli’s YouTube channel ( http://www.youtube.com/ska4him) for even more exposure and threw it on my wife’s new iPod Touch.

I have since made another video that just highlighted some of the fun things we were able to do while getting treatment in New York (http://animoto.com/play/0d2c4b2566cd8448a4d64fb8b83087d3 ). We decided to leave our hospital in Iowa for better treatment options further away from home in New York City at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. While it’s hard being so far away from our friends and family, it really helps to have a tool to share some of the things that are going on out here while we are getting treatments. I’m so happy I found animoto mentioned on a Google blog post (I’m a huge Google fan and avid Picasa user). My All Access Pass purchase was one of the easiest decisions I made during a year full of extremely difficult ones.

Thanks for pursuing your ideas and bringing it all to fruition. I can’t wait to see what other features you guys roll out, and all the best with your talks with Google!!!

Aaron H.

~ by brad on January 11th, 2008.