Moto Spotlight Player on Android

I’ve been following this interactive Player for a while – it allows a sort of 3D viewing experience of animated stories, using the phone as a camera into the scene.
News is a bit scarce now though so I’ll update current releases.

The idea is you follow the story characters and scenes by exploring a 3D world, around the phone or tablet – so you have to move it about, tilt, etc to get more clues or info. At least this was used in the first version.

Moto Spotlight Windy Day story - red hat to the fore
Moto Spotlight Windy Day story – red hat to the fore

October 2013, the Windy Day game debuted with a red hat icon on Moto X phones – prompting mild fury from some users who didn’t want unrequested ‘bloatware’ on their phones.

There is some news of a film release (ie, cinematic rather than animated) but that was 2 years ago.

Now, the main site for it now seems to be YouTube.

It says: Published on 21 Dec 2015
On mobile, must view in YouTube App. On desktop, in Chrome or FireFox.

Spotlight Special Delivery cartoon
Spotlight Special Delivery cartoon

So basically, now just content… yet more so-called funny cartoons. In a 3D – or panoramic – view. This looks like all those old VRML things, or the Adobe panoramic system beloved of websites circa 90s.

See this link for the only item now to be seen – ‘Special Delivery’.
Google website for Spotlight >

Non Linear Narrative

As an ex-art college lecturer, this reminded me of the sort of ideas that students think up in order to use the technology – rather than researching users interests. It is also the same old search or quest concept of looking for things. This only works (and boringly) in games. The stories tend to be committee driven, quirky, childish, harmless nonsense. The current cartoon even has that brassy retro cartoon music. People are supposed to spin the scene around, to see the characters and scenes.
No one asks why.

Spotlight content as originally conceived is the same old multiple path hypertext as seen since before the web. It has never worked or been remotely popular. Lecturers used to set non linear projects as punishment. When I started Story Software, I hoped that some people might use the extendable canvas as a non linear layout for fiction or comics – like a giant poster that can be navigated, zoomed into , etc, using the inf map feature for orientation.

Even I never got around to writing stories for it, and it was my idea 8)

This is why it has ended up as another YouTube cartoon release…

Links
Spotlight Player on Play Store >

New Spotlight release called Help! (not the Beatles) >

Creative writing app and ebooks bundle

Online in January 2016

INCREASE YOUR CREATIVITY WITH OUR TOP APP and HOW TO WRITE BOOKS, and MUCH MORE
Notes Story Board v2.2 – this has a canvas for text and images, so you can work on ideas and longer documents. Previous versions are Story Lite and Story Turbo since 2010. See Features

FIVE EBOOKS
These are password protected PDFs. They are also available as Kindle ebooks at £4.99, see Kindle Amazon section below.
• How To Write Fiction and Narrative (30 pages with Exercises)
• How to Write Scripts for Film and Movies (127 pages with Exercises)
• The Modern Muse – Poetry and Copywriting (extract, 30 pages with exercises)
• Guide to Genres (57 pages)
• Graphic Novels, Pictorial Narrative and Comics (16 pages)

CLIP ART to use in Notes Story Board
To go with the Graphic Novels ebook, we made a collection of comic and graphic related clip art, which is also included.
This has 200 files in many useful categories, see Features for more details. These are for use in Notes Story Board or any other program.

All this for whatever you want to pay, starting at £1.99