Adobe today announced Adobe Voice, a new iPad app that allows users to make simple animated video "stories" that incorporate voice, photos, icons, music, animated themes, and more. Designed for people that have little to no filmmaking experience, Adobe Voice imagines itself as a useful presentation creation tool for everyone from small business owners to students.
Designed to help people make an impact online and across social networks -- without requiring any filming or editing -- Adobe Voice is ideal for creative professionals prototyping a project, nonprofits championing a cause, small business owners connecting with customers or students looking to create an interactive and engaging school report.
Adobe Voice can be used to create videos for a wide array of topics, though they are more akin to animated slideshows than traditional videos. The app has a gallery that includes several pre-made videos available through an "Explore" feature, showing the myriad ways the videos can be used: delivering a homework assignment, telling a story, showing off a product, and describing a charity organization are all given as examples.
Adobe aims to assist in the video creation process from idea to completed video with Adobe Voice. The app opens with a set of general story templates that can be used to create a video, including "Explain Something," "Teach a Lesson," "Share an Invitation," and "Promote an Idea," among others. The app also includes ideas for inspiration, suggesting title topics from categories ranging from personal to business to instructional.
Once a template is chosen, the app walks a user through the process of creating a video using simple tap gestures to insert audio and images to a series of slides. Each slide begins with a recording of the user's own voice, which is then set to music.
Icons, text, and images are then added to each slide, from Adobe's own cache of licensed content. Users can search for a photo or icon to represent what they're aiming to convey, which can be added to a video in a few simple steps. By combining several image and text slides with user-created voiceovers, the video is generated bit-by-bit and the entire creation process can take as little as just a few minutes.
Video stories can be customized with a variety of different animated themes (there are more than 30), several different layouts, and mood-appropriate music choices. They're also sharable through a number of different social media outlets including Facebook and Twitter, as well as Adobe's Creative Cloud platform.
Top Rated Comments
Absolutely agree. It's interesting that making storytelling "fun" in Adobe's opinion means using only their content (except for snippets of your voice). This seems like nothing more than glorified clip-art in a PowerPoint, with recorded vocals.