StoryTime for Windows

Moonbot's StoryTime audio storyboard app is just like everything emanating from the Moonbase: Cool, quirky, and outside the box. Like the traditional storyboard, StoryTime is designed to help you get your ideas down quickly, try out a lot of different concepts, and rough out scenes and sequences. It's not intended for creating polished final products but rather to give interactive story builders, animators, movie designers, and others a quick-and-easy tool for assembling storyboards, timing scenes and audio, and saving the results as a video or as an XML file that can be used with pro editing tools. StoryTime is free, but it only runs in 64-bit Windows systems (Mac, too).

StoryTime's user interface resembles similar tools since the layout is simple but logical and very easy to manage, with drag-and-drop and batch file capability. While the program's File and Edit menus reflect StoryTime's keep-it-easy philosophy, our options weren't limited when it came to audio sources. Clicking Audio Input on the File menu showed no less than 15 different sources, though the fanciest piece of gear in our modest PC was a 10-year-old external sound card. We could also configure Framerate and OS Mapping. It's best to use images of the same size and properties when creating a movie in StoryTime, and all images must have even-number resolutions to avoid errors when exporting files. We started by dragging some images into the interface to see what would happen. StoryTime displays image and audio timing data in timelines beneath the storyboard panel. StoryTime saved our finished movie as an XML file we could export. Pro users will appreciate the Export to Editing command.

While StoryTime is designed to be quick and easy to use, it requires some experience with video editing and related processes to get the most out of it. It's also a work in progress that could use a Help file, but this simple yet clever tool is still impressive.