Thicket meets Animoto: A word/image montage with a few kinks

Thicket

This is Thicket…

The iTunes store describes Thicket as “an audiovisual playground that allows anyone to create beautiful sounds and pictures from simple finger touches.” It functions a

 s an expandable interactive art platform.

Basically, you use fingertip touch to create art in real time that is accompanied by music produced by your touch. Each mode creates its own abstract visual melody. No two interactive art experiences can be the same.

The user can just enjoy the playground or the app offers an option to take snapshots. After a bit, I was able to create and capture the images with some intention. It was definitely an act that resembled dancing as I attempted to produce the image that left enough time to release my touch to  hit the photo icon and capture my intended vision.

When taking snapshots, users aren’t able to over-control the process of capturing the abstract image. Despite the user’s best efforts, a level of spontaneous interaction between the platform and user will always be captured.

The app is available in apple and android products and is free. It comes with one music/artmaking mode. Other modes can purchased for a mere 99 cents. New modes are released monthly. Each mode has its own music and abstract style.

Practical Application

I kept wondering what to do with the images? How could they be used in the ESL classroom? How could I integrate this app into my curriculum?

It didn’t take long into my app review/playing/getting lost before I realized that the images just weren’t going to be enough. Although Thicket is seriously cool, it wasn’t an application that could be useful to my students in the long run – on its own.

I started to wonder how to create an interaction between words, the abstract images, and music… how to produce a multimedia montage of some sort. And that is when it hit me: I needed an app mash-up!

So, I got set on producing a multimedia montage using the images produced on Thicket.

Enter Animoto

I downloaded Animoto. This app was totted as the easiest way to create the most extraordinary videos of your life using music, video clips, and photos. I was in!

Animoto is fairly easy to use and the interface is straightforward. You select the media that you want to use. Next, you select the style and music from a menu provided you. After that, you can add any text and finally, preview, and publish.

I never did figure out how to rearrange the images and text. The app just seems to take the media in order that it is selected and next goes the text, at the end – except for the title page.

Further investigation will probably reveal… breaking news! I just figured it out. On an iPhone, hold down until the picture icon enlarges and then, you can move the photo. The text box does stay at the end of the video. So, there is no intermixing text and media in the cheap (free) version. 

Sharing the video took some time to figure out. I had to signup with Vimeo, if I wanted to download, and not just share it via Facebook or as a link in an email. Perhaps, the sharing issue is made easier by upgrading.

The results… see below… was a fun multimedia montage that would allow students to express themselves in a pretty exciting way.

In the end, I think that I would keep looking for another, more flexible low-cost app for the students before actually assigning a project similar to this one. I think that there were too many kinks and would want an app that allows more interaction between text, image, and music.

SPOILER ALERT: Totally forget the "t" in abstraction... and I am not going back to fix... nope. No siree! It is darn fine the way it is.

And it has a political message: Mrs. Jones get into 2013 or you have a mutiny on your hands! 

The lite version is free and available to all PDIs. There are upgrades available to go Plus ($5/month) or Pro ($39/month).