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.

I think Tom is having way too much fun with feedback emails. Check out this one he just forwarded me. All names have been changed for privacy purposes, except for Tom’s.

—————-

On 9/30/07, ANIMOTO < theguys@animoto.com> wrote:Contact from the web site.

Reply-to: sam@animotouser.com

User: sam user
Email: sam@animotouser.com
Project key: [not during a project]

Subject:
[none given]

Message:
how do i change the gender on my profile? it said female, i checked the wrong box i suppose. i’m suppose to be male, last i check.

thanks,
sam

——————

And Tom’s reply:

———-

Sam,

Profile gender realignment surgery is a very serious issue and I want to make sure you’ve fully considered what you’re doing before you proceed. Are you absolutely sure you want to do this? It is very difficult to go back and can require even more costly and unpredictable surgeries.

With that said, I’ve gone ahead and made you a man again. Congratulations. Heh.

Thanks,
TOM (tech guy)

~ by tech guy stevie on October 1, 2007.

I thought it might be kinda interesting to post a glimpse of the type of feedback we get. So here’s what we’ve read in the past few hours:

09:23 “I love the site and must say I am a bit addicted already.”
09:22 “Its a great product… Really Like it.. Some ideas for future releases might be… to allow for Text Input over images or between images… Also as you grow, some sort of estimated delivery time of a completed video…”
09:16 “I accidentally uploaded a wma file and my video exploded! Tell me there is a way to get all the photos back as I had almost 100 of them!”
09:03 “I Love this site! Great job! I work for Apple, have all thier cool editing and composing tools, yet here am addicted and telling the world!”
08:58 “Get Photobucket working please!!!
08:58 “Any idea how soon we’ll be able to download high resolution verions to our desktops?”
08:53 “LOVE this app gentlemen…LOVE IT! !”
08:51 “I just made my first video. It’s addicting!”
08:51 “oh my god!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that was AWESOME!!!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GUYS MADE IT WAS SO GREAT!THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!! IT LOOKS LIKE A COMMERICAL!!”
08:44 “Hi guys, I have been playing around with the tool and I am quite positively impressed. Yes there are a few rough corners but overall this is very good as a start. The only very basic thing I regret is that I can’t edit a wrong description or mispelled title as this can easily happen.”
08:42 “i want for photobucket”
08:42 “Impressive system, but would love to make them on my pc rather than uploading, as we have 3rd world broadband in NZ. Or would a normal pc struggle to assemble these videos? Anyway very nice.
08:40 “Could use some more different music to choose from. Not all of us like Electronica and Hip Hop.”
08:39 “If I log in I see under the sign My video’s , the video you just made. But when I click on play, it doesn’t show???”
08:39 “Hi, I signed up yesterday and made a quick test 30s video. When I saw it I had a rare “wow” moment. I have made my own slide shows using Sony Vegas so I know how much work it would take to make one like this. I am not often this impressed with new Web2.0 services but Animoto has a lot of potential. I would happily sign up for your full-length service if I could: 1. Tweak the video a little. Having done my own I would like a little control over my videos. So Animoto gives me a great starter and does 95% of the work and then using some really simple, intuitive controls I can tweak the effects and timings. 2. Allow my friends to suggest other images to use in place of specific ones in my video or maybe even just to drop them in so I can preview and then either accept or reject them. 3. Merge videos from others together. Lets say different people had taken pictures at the same event and each produced their own Animoto video then they could all agree to merge them into one new video showing the event from lots of different perspectives. Hope my suggestions are helpful. I’m going to try another video later with my own music. Thanks again for a great new service.”
08:29 “Congratulations on the launch. When I first heard about this I had to try it out and I can’t beleive how good this is!! I don’t want to offend you guys as I can imaging how much work you have put in already, but here is a few suggestions (most you would have thought about already) for making this even more special: 1) Include the ability to add captions to the photos. 2) Much more variety of music, all CC licenced of course, but not everyone has the same taste in music as you. You mentioned in the FAQ, “if we like what we hear we may consider it”. I;d hope this is referencing quality rather than personal preferance to style etc. A bit of Jazz, folk etc ??? 3) Download the videos (I know youve thought of this already) 4) Integrate with video sharing sites. Check out http://heyspread.com/ 5) Keep up the good work.”
08:25 “Great, great great! I absolutely love the videos and the music. Do you have any idea when we will be able to download the videos? Thanks for such a wonderful product!”
08:25 “Guys, I hope that you are getting this all over Facebook, Myspace, etc. They are a perfect group of users that would love the simplicity and great end result you are delivering. I mentioned the site on Xing.com and there are some people starting to discuss Animoto. Best of luck and keep it up.”
08:23 “This the greatest and very easy to use! Thanks for putting it together.”
08:20 “I’m so excited for this and wish you the best. Let me know if/when you need investors. I’m totally buying your stock. Also, the pic on the employment page? HOT! “
08:12 “Hey guys, where’s the “home” link. Add one down by the “about us” link.”
08:11 “You guys are awesome! I’m really impressed! Further suggestions for improvement would be the inclusion of captions & txt..but all in all this is an amazing tool =) will no doubt be making more animoto.”
08:02 “I just uploaded 115 pictures and only 30 something actually appear to make a video. I saw each picture uploaded. Am I doing something wrong? Is their a limit to the server space for a video? Thanks.”
08:01 “Will a future version of animoto take home movies and mix them into music videos?”
07:55 “It was better then I expected.”
07:55 “Hello, Animoto guys; I just finished my first try at creating a video. I think ANIMOTO is an AWESOME tool for creating video. It’s very simple and the video is sooo COOL! I’m planning to create a video for my sister’s wedding. I hope I can download the video. I hope you guys to have the download feature soon!”
07:51 “Hello ! Great, great, great, amazing work !!!!! One sad point, my friends and I were almost crying when we saw this : even the full videos are in low res !!! This is the reason that prevents me from buying a full unlimited access… It is such a waste to me !! such great work for such a disappointment… Congratulations, again !”
07:46 “Hello, you have done a amazing work and one of the best products, that I’m ever seen. Thanks and, Keep at it!”
07:45 “This is the best thing EVER!! I LOVE IT. What a great way to showcase your photos – for an event, photos of product that you design, etc. Great job!!”
07:40 “huh ? how can we retrieve our password once lost ? Thank you…”

[Btw, we read and respond to everything you write us. ]

~ by producer guy jason on August 20, 2007.