Have you ever thought you had a chance to direct a movie and tell a story you have in mind through it? If yes, then the site Xtranormal.com is the place to explore.

The site makes it a breeze to create fully animated scenes with customisable actors and background. Actors can have dialogues not only in text form but recorded voices as well. What’s interesting here is that the actors actually appear to lip sync with the recorded voice as they deliver the recorded dialogues. The range of backgrounds extends from indoors such as kitchen, office, libraries, bed rooms, living rooms, etc., to outdoors such as football fields, historic landmarks, mountains, gardens, etc.

Starting off with Xtranormal is easy. All it takes is registration followed by selecting the Create tab once you logged in. Here, pressing Get Started Now button opens up the gallery of collections with themes such as army dudes, stick figures, political elections, wedding party, prom night, bowling arena with rowdy crowd or innocent looking bears and pandas inside room.

Apart from these, there are small icons of 20 such themes extending the collection to celebrities, sports, robots and many more. Selecting any of the themes, say army dudes, results in launching of a movie wizard starting with set design, and moving up to definition of actors, sounds and story. In the first step of the wizard, select an appropriate background set from over a dozen choices in each of the movie themes. Once finished, proceed to step two of the wizard and customise the actors. In free version, there can be only two actors, but the wider range of choices make even two actors an adequate platform to start a scene with.

Having over hundred male and female actors, and a wide range of male and female voices with accents of American, Asian and European countries, there’s plenty to play around and mix and match here. Third item in the wizard is selection of background sound and music. Depending upon the theme and background set selected, sounds of rain, insects, restaurants, etc can fit in quite well. Continuing the example of army dudes above, select the battlefield sound and proceed to the fourth and last step of the wizard, i.e. story definition. Here’s where the fun really starts. Simply add the text that actors have to say and build up conversation with sequence of dialogues.

As actors speak, they are expected to show gestures too which can be set up quite nicely by using the left side toolbox of motion, faces, points-at and looks-at tool. These tools have list of options within each providing a rich library of expressions for any creative director who wants to have the actors deliver according to the requirements. An army due can raise fist in the air, point towards a target at the back, make a disgusting face and change his orientation towards one of the 10 different camera angles which can be defined within the sequence of the movie giving it a realistic motion picture look which differentiates Xtranormal from other comic type web-based services offering only static looking scenes.

Camera angles can focus on the face of actors while they speak or can be repositioned sideways among other views. Add to this the ability of background voices while actors speak such as ringing of bells, chainsaw, laughter, running, walking, etc, and Xtranormal becomes a complete package in itself as all these options neatly come together in an easy to understand layout.

The movies can be previewed quickly in low resolution and once all the editing is done in the Story tab (which is sure to take some time given the range of possibilities available), it can be published with complete rendering in high quality. The published movies can be shared over social networking sites or through a web link, and can be uploaded on YouTube as well. Using the My Stuff tab, movies created with Xtranormal can be downloaded for offline viewing.

Xtranormal is a tool that has made its presence felt across the world. According to the site, there have been more than 10 million stories and growing, and the site has been covered and mentioned by major international news outlets. In terms of usage, the potential of Xtranormal has been exploited by political cartoonists, enthusiastic animators, innovative teachers and online advertisers by both individuals as well as some large companies.

For those looking for speedy development, there’s a desktop version available in addition to the web based one. In short, the site Xtranormal lives up well to its tall claim — ‘If you can type, you can make movies’. So log on, and create your first ever movie right away!