New App Ptch Creates Mini Music Videos
If Instagram makes you feel like a phenomenal photographer, Ptch is going to make you feel like a hotshot music video director. The new social app, which launches today for the iPhone and iPad, mashes together personal photos and videos, overlays popular songs and stylizes it all in a 60-second shareable “ptch.”
“Simply filtering a video is not meaningful,” Ptch CEO Ed Leonard tells Rolling Stone. “Using what we call ‘bite-sized media’ to create visual dialogue, that’s what we are trying to do.”
Ptch comes with a handful of styles that, like Instagram filters, add character to each video with flashy transitions, pop-up captions and rendered looks. (Watch a sample ptch here.) Users can also open up someone else’s ptch and borrow individual photos or video clips (called “assets”) to remix their own creation.
For music fans, this means being able to go to a concert and pull from various views of the stage taken by fellow concertgoers, then scoring it with a song from the band. Users can instantly replicate, for example, Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 concert film compiled entirely from fan footage. The bands can also participate in the dialogue by sharing backstage shots to all the Ptch users in the audience.
Leonard hopes that brands like Red Bull, Coachella and Paramount will want to be involved by seeding location-based assets (like quotable movie clips) and styles that users can mash into their ptch and share. Although the app is backed by DreamWorks Animation, Leonard is hesitant to call it a movie app. However, a partnership with film studios to create fan-made movie trailers seems like a probable next step.
The list of songs currently available to score a ptch is impressive, ranging from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Elton John to Nicki Minaj. In the near future, Ptch plans to be able to tap into a user’s iTunes library.