Interview with Jason Hsiao Co-Founder and President Animoto Productions

Who are you?

We are a bunch of techies and former film/TV producers who, two years ago, decided to lock ourselves in a room together and nerd out. The Animoto team include producers and post-production specialists from MTV, NBC, Comedy Central, VH1, ABC, and Warner Brothers.

Where are you based?

New York City

What do you do?

Animoto is a web application that takes your photos and music and automatically produces a professional MTV-like video. Each video is perfectly orchestrated to every nuance of the music. Whether it’s punk, pop, hip-hop or a classical Mozart piece, every Animoto video is totally customized and no two videos are the same. Even videos generated with an identical set of images and music will each have a completely distinct set of motion design.

What do you love?

We love seeing people’s reaction when they see their first Animoto video.

How and when did animoto begin?

Animoto started two and a half years ago in the back of sake bar in the East Village.

We wanted to address the fact that people have started to think differently about how they take photos with their digital cameras. They are thinking less like photographers of the past, who capture individual moments, and increasingly more like video producers who capture an entire experience through a series of images.

Today it’s not uncommon for people to take dozens, even hundreds of pictures at a time. Because traditional solutions like slide shows don’t serve this way of thinking very well, new ideas for how to capture and share a whole experience are needed.

We decided it’s time to start innovating new ways for people to share their stories and express themselves through media. We’ve set out to try and bridge the gap between production value in what’s seen with Internet video and what’s seen in film and television today using the latest of cutting-edge entertainment post-production technology.

Animoto.com launched in August of 2007.

What are the main features of the website?

It takes just a few minutes to make a video from your photos and music. The final product is as good as something you’d see on TV. Videos can be emailed, downloaded, embedded in pages on websites including social network sites like Facebook and MySpace, or exported directly to YouTube.