Last week-end, we gathered with 29 artists, filmmakers and political activists to participate to our 2-day creative workshop in Paris. Our goal: to produce a collective multimedia piece in a very short time around the theme “Vive la crise ?”
— The HonkyLab
Sneak Peak At Our Holidays Workshop
This week, four of us (Sarah, Damien, Maria and I) at the HonkyLab took advantage of the Winter break to test the upcoming release of Klynt… while having fun!
To frame this two-day workshop, we defined a creative brief:
- Use a playful, rhythmic format inspired by the world of children’s games,
- Getting into the theme: “All cats are gray in the dark”,
… Which has mostly been ignored by our undisciplined team!
Only Sarah played by the rules, she describes her idea as: “Tired of reviewing the past year, trying to fix the same old things? You have the 12 strokes of midnight to choose at least one evil resolution for 2012… Will you take the risk?”
With some Internet media research and the use of our Klynt software only, here is the project that she succeeded in producing in a relatively short time:
- 4h: game design + research of content,
- 4h: creation of the storyboard with Klynt, preliminary design and layout,
- 4h: multimedia editing with Klynt.
Add an hour to it for putting it online on Thursday evening (plus final touches) and that was it!
What about you, what are your evil resolutions for this year ?
In any case, Happy New Year!
— Jessica
Discover Klynt! HonkyLab research project is now public.
Almost two years ago, we launched the revamp of Klynt, our in-house prototype editing production tool with the goal to design a versatile, professional & universal application.
Today, we are thrilled to invite you to participate to our open demo release.
It’s now free and it takes only a few minutes to download and install.
Klynt is a project by HonkyLab, Honkytonk in-house media lab.
Follow us on twitter : @HonkytonkFilms & @klynt_app
Share and like Klynt on facebook
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About Klynt
Klynt is a new editing & publishing app dedicated to interactive storytellers. It was designed to help authors create immersive online content using the internet both as a distribution & creative space. With Klynt, authors can connect to today’s most popular media platforms and social networks and explore new narrative formats without writing a single line of code.
A Brief Introduction to Klynt – Part 2: What it Takes
First Klynt 2009 prototype (extract from notice created for Lord Chris Marker…)
So here we are with Klynt official V1 realease, almost a year ago after we launched the revamp of the app, from an in-house prototype tool to a versatile, professional app.
We have worked hard – almost 4500 hours to be precise in 2010 alone – to reach this first release that is loaded with creative features and a brand new interface design.
When I say hard, I mean it. I still have a limited experience in software development but I have witnessed that when you mix the whole idea of agile development with documentary production stuff and fluctuent realities, you can create a quiet extraordinary working environment. To say the least.
So I would first like to thank both the engineers, the authors, friends, partners, interns, consultants, institutions and clients who had faith in the project from the beginning. We have definitely come a long way already. And, well, we would like to thank you in public (private party coming soon too…stay tuned) with our deepest regards.
To Faith!
Cheers,
Arnaud
A Brief Introduction to Klynt – Part 3: Where we Stand
Klynt Editor Graphic Design Revamp Proposal by Brieuc Dupont - september 2010
I remember back in 2007, while working on Journey to The End of Coal i-doc (aka Voyage au bout du charbon), how cool it would be to allow anybody to create his own interactive documentary, and that it would make sense to create a “platform” for that (yeah, well the whole there-is-an-app-for-that-too did not exist yet). I guess this is what we have achieved today. Pushing the whole idea further actually.
What we came up with is kind of something hard to describe in words – excuse my french. The whole app is a mash-up in itself. Both in terms of interface design, features and distribution model.
About the interface
Colors, size, access, we have spent a lot of efforts on ergonomics. With Brieuc Dupont, our lead interface and graphic designer on Klynt, we tried to stay focused on not trying to reinvent the wheel. In other terms, if you know the basics of Final Cut, Photoshop and WordPress (or any blog publishing platform), it takes you about a couple of minutes to see how the interface basically works. I mean, we can certainly improve a lot of things (and we will in the next coming weeks), but let’s say it: the interface is quite user-friendly and fun to play with.
About the features
This is where we have been spending most of our time. The whole concept of mixing video, photo, sound, text and hyperlink editing features in one app is something huge. Still, it has always been clear, Klynt is no video editing nor audio mixing app or text editor. It will not replace any of these great tools we already have. Still, it should offer the minimum set of editing to make it powerful and creative enough. It does.
But not only. What makes it unique now is really the mix of such features with external media and platforms like Google Maps, YouTube videos, Flickr images, Facebook and Twitter to start with. We believe it really opens a whole new space of creativity. It is not just about making hypervideo (which is nice enough) but it is about curating the internet. Making something valuable with something else. DIY and Remix culture united.
About our distribution model
Well, as you can read in our pricing section, things are pretty straight forward. What we do now is Premium licensing for organizations. Why? Because it makes sense as we have been historically a production company working on ideas, authors, and users and storytelling altogether and that we want to keep it this way.
To some extent, what we have been doing with WWF, Terre-Net Media, TV5 Monde, EMI or CUEJ (the last two being journalism training schools in France) or L’Equipe is quite similar to what we have been doing and will continue to do with authors and journalists we work with for our own productions. What we do is opening our tool box and know-how and mentoring them in creating their own project, using their own voice, creating their own interactive formula. This is actualy a quite rewarding experience and we still love it so far.
Now, making Klynt available to freelance and students and a broader community of user is only a step away. Stay tuned!
Welcome on klynt.net
We are very pleased to launch Klynt.net new website on the interweb.
We thought about it as both a vitrine for the app but most of all, a place to share ideas and feedback on the soon to open Klynt community area.
This is also the opportunity for us to unveil Klynt’s new visual identity, interface and features, designed by our team at Honkytonk Films and developed with the indirect help of the thousands of developers forming today’s magnificent open source community.
We hope you will find it interesting and – for those of you who have not received an invitation to test the app yet, help you wait a little longer.
Best regards,
Arnaud, Guillaume, Sarah, Thibaut, David, Fabien, Maria, Jessica & Damien
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