Xtranormal lets you choose your character {screen capture from xtranormal.com}

I didn’t grow up aspiring to be in advertising. As a young adult, I’d always longed to make the Great American Movie. But as I got older, I quickly realized that I liked having a car. And having multiple pairs of pants. And not having to steal toilet paper from fast food restaurants. So I turned to one of the few disciplines you can still go to be creative and make a living without selling your organs on the black market. Besides prostitution, anyway.

I’m talking about the ol’ advertising shuck and jive. The marketing hustle. The art of the sale. See, agencies are stocked with arty douchebags, emo English majors, and would-be poets who sold their souls to live in a better tax bracket. And I’m proud to be one of them.

That said, I still liked to daydream every once in a while. Ponder what coulda/woulda/shoulda been. Fantasize about that movie career. Then I ran across Xtranormal. It’s a simple, drag-and-drop editing interface you can access through your browser that allows you to make crude little animated movies with nothing more than a bunch of text. Select your animated actors. Choose your setting. Move the camera around. Add music.  And BOOM, in no time you’ve got yourself a little piece of moo-vee magic.

I put this one together at lunch. And it shows:

If you spend more than a half hour making a movie on Xtranormal, you’re either very serious about movie-making, or very sad. Either way, you have the option to download State, their free offline, suped-up version of the browser platform.

So go ahead. Give it a try. Tap in to your inner James Cameron.  Or inner-Wes Anderson if you don’t believe in selling out to The Man like I did.  Or inner-Roman Polanski if you’re a pervert.

And feel free to send me the URL of your magnum opus when you’re finished - Xtranormal gives you the option to post it to YouTube. Who knows, maybe I’ll collect them and post them all together; we’ll have ourselves the first In-Blog Film Festival ever.  Mark your calendars.

Now that would be sad. Yet somehow awesome, too. But mainly sad.

When he’s not destroying American cinema, M. M. McDermott is here. Email him at mmcdermott@getrenegade.com.

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