Overview
I like short movies because the ideas are concentrated and you don’t have to watch some fill-up content that a Hollywood director decided to add to get the movie up to 2 hours. For some ‘blockbusters’ is enough to watch the trailer to know everything about. The ‘IMDB Top 250’ list of the best rated movies for all years has no movie for the year 2013, yet ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ from ‘94 is still the first on the list (and all top 5 movies there are from the 70s and 90s). One conclusion would be that they don’t make movies like they used to, now most movies rely on heavy special effects and less on an actual interesting story. Instead of watching a 2 hour movie that has a very simple plot and a lot of boring fill-up content, why not watch a condensed short film?
Short films have the advantage of presenting the idea/plot faster. Instead of a 2 hour movie you can watch 20 short ones and be more entertained overall. By watching short movies you’d also support young producers that don’t have big budgets to promote their stories.
Blinkamovie is a website that focuses on publishing short movies while giving the viewer access to social tools. First of all, you can login using your Facebook account and like/share the short movies. Since there are thousands of them you can choose a particular category to sort them and filter by length. Furthermore you can discuss with other users a specific short film and invite your Facebook friends for a private viewing session of a movie. Blinkamovie is a social cinema site and now it has a mobile version called ‘Storypod Short Films’.
The app
The app is available for free for Android users and it has over 200 short movies (list is updated regularly as new producers join). Since each movie is about 5-7 minutes (in average, as some go over 20 minutes), with StoryPod you get over 20 hours of entertainment. From short animation films to dramatic plane crashes and zombie attacks, you can find a short movie for any taste. I try to spend around 15 minute for each video review but with StoryPod I got ‘lost’ and watched over 1 hour of short films. It all started with the video presentation below:
Great stories in high quality, that’s what you get with StoryPod. After the app is installed you can access four sections:
- StoryTV. With StoryTV you can access a continuous flow of short films. This is a synchronized short-film TV channel that will play automatically a stream of short videos without you needing to tap on a button and change the movies.
- Films. The core of StoryPod, this is where you can access the hundreds of available short movies. Right now in the app there isn’t a way to filter/sort movies as it is for their online web service (Blinkamovie), but this is a feature in the making. You enjoy tens of hours of entertainment by the tap of a button. These short stories are pre-selected from thousand others and they also accept submissions from new producers (if you’re one of them check out their Blinkamovie website to submit a video).
- Settings. StoryPod doesn’t need advanced settings that’s why the only options available are those for enabling/disabling subtitles (for movies that need it), specifying the language for the subtitle text and finally the quality of the videos. By default video quality is set to normal but you can increase or decrease it depending on how well your device can render videos.
- About. This section only shows some basic information about the app. StoryPod is not only a social cinema channel for regular viewers, it can also be used as a video delivery platform by producers and advertisers. They can create custom-branded versions of StoryPod on request that deliver a specific video content, suitable for video producers, YouTube partners, media companies and so on. To get in touch with them regarding this possibility visit their official website at www.storypod.com.
Conclusion
StoryPod is dedicated to show great short films for cinema lovers. With it you have your own little mobile cinema right in your pocket. It’s one of the few apps that I’ll keep installed on my device as I like short movies. The only suggestion is to integrate the social interaction options they have for the online service (Blinkamovie) so I’ll be able to create story sessions to watch with the family.
You can get more details about the app on www.storypod.com or download it for free directly from Google Play: Download StoryPod.
Name: StoryPod Short Films
Developer: Blinkamovie Ltd.
Size: 1.6Mb
Package: com.blinkamovie.storypod.apk
Version: 1.0.3
Last update: August 28, 2013
Price: Free
