Toonamation Back Online
We’ve been off the air for a while now, but not because we died. Seth and I have been focusing on growing our company behind the scenes, including working hard to enhance the capabilities of our software. For example, the photo and video demos we previewed last year were created using Image and Numeric Python/NumPy. This combination makes for a very flexible prototyping environment, which I still prefer for brainstorming 2D graphic effects, but image manipulations coded in it don’t run particularly fast, especially when applied to large images or videos. Relative to where we were last year, we now have a wider variety of effects, including several automatatic rototooning methods to give images and videos a hand-crafted “A Scanner Darkly” rotoscope look, and they run more than an order of magnitude faster.
Here are some examples of our new effects. Click on an image to see several different videotoon demos made using that same content. FYI, the source for the first three sets of demos was iStockVideo, and the source for the fourth was MotionZoneHD.
We also reworked our business model. Seth and I initially thought our main business could be B2C, such that we could evolve this site to be the center of a community where people could upload their photos and/or videos and enjoy applying cool Toonamation effects to them online on a Freemium basis. Tara Hunt, a generous person in correspondence and in person, liked this model and offered to help us develop it. However, we ultimately moved away from it for several reasons. For one thing, it took a long period of arduous hacking for us to get the effects fast enough for realistic online use, and even when we did, the server costs would still have been daunting. We decided that we prefer to grow Toonamation as a startup by bootstrapping (at least for the moment) and retain our autonomy, rather than giving it up in exchange for VC funding. For another thing, we didn’t want to be seen as or to compete as one among the current crop of hundreds of photo-sharing and video-sharing sites, when we’re something more, but also something less. It would take a long time for us to do the community-building thing well enough, if we ever could, but we’d also be entering into what increasingly looks like a commodity market - where can I get the most features for the best price? We’re different in that we’re offering unique tech that no one else has been able to duplicate, and we should keep that as our main focus. As a third thing, both Seth and I are introverts and being an outgoing and interactive community advocate is not a good fit by temperment or something that I, in particular, would naturally enjoy. I groove on the idea of people using my stuff, but I’m a researcher/loner by nature and whenever I’m too long in the midst of a community I feel restive (and restless) and start edging towards its periphery. “Hey what’s that shiny thing over there?”
In light of all that, it made more sense to us to focus on licensing our capabilities B2B to pre-existing photo-sharing and video-sharing communities, along other kinds of licensing, such as the ToonIt! plugin for After Effects and Final Cut Pro we’re releasing with Digital Anarchy. Toonamation tech could then be incorporated into their sites and run on their servers to enhance the experience of their users. This would be win-win in that we’d be offering them something cool that they don’t have, and they’d be offering us an outlet and a way to make money that we’d have a lot of trouble developing on our own, even if we could. It lets both parties do what they do best, especially freeing us up to focus on developing our next round of out-of-sight effects, which is where we’d really like to be. So, now we’re finally open for business and actively pursuing licensing contacts. If you have interest, ideas, or suggestions along these lines, we’d appreciate it if you could let us know or drop us a note. Comments are good or you could write to us at stan at toonamation dot com or seth at toonamation dot com. Thanks.
Last, but not least, Seth and I are now officially incorporated as Toonamation.
Technorati Tags: rotoscoping, cartoon plugin, comic plugin, non-photorealistic rendering, After Effects plugin, Final Cut Pro plugin, Toonamation, ToonIt!, A Scanner Darkly, Schwab commercial, Waking Life