Prezi Launches Nutshell, An App To Turn Photos Into ‘Mini-Movies’

Prezi’s online presentation software already offers a popular alternative to creating otherwise tedious and visually uninspiring PowerPoint presentations, but now it seems the startup wants in on the consumer ‘video’ sharing trend. Taking the same dynamic zooming tech used to spruce up Prezi presentations, the company has created a new app called Nutshell.

Simply put, the iOS app lets you take three photos in succession, overlay text and graphics, and turn the result into a short ‘movie’ sequence. Essentially, it’s a way of injecting motion into photos taken on your phone. Or, perhaps, another way to think of it is the ‘Ken Burns effect’ — zooming and panning — that we’ve all become accustomed to in apps like Apple’s iPhoto, but taken up a couple of notches.

In fact, Prezi says the idea for Nutshell came about after the startup realised that people were using Prezi’s “zoom-able presentation canvas” for sharing events like birthdays, road trips, and even marriage proposals, apparently. In other words, for distinctly consumer purposes, taking advantage of the ease at which Prezi lets you combine photos, videos, text and graphics to ‘tell a story’.

And with the reimagining of some of Prezi’s features for purely consumer purposes, it’s no surprise that the resulting ‘nutshells’ can easily be shared by email, text message or posted to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, the latter three are also competitors to an app like Nutshell, with their own photo and video creation and sharing features, along with Twitter-owned Vine, and a plethora of other short visual storytelling apps like Coub or musixMatch’s recently-released Clip.

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