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Last year saw the rise of the hugely popular manga camera generation of apps that take any normal photo and turn them into pictures that look like they were drawn by a manga artist. The progression then from photos to videos was the obvious next step in the evolution of such apps. One such development studio has done just that with Aroha's recent release of Comic Director.
Comic Director allows any video recorded or saved on a smartphone or tablet to have various visual effects applied to it as it plays. Besides the standard "manga effect", there are also a couple of colored cartoon variations, a realistic pencil sketch drawing effect and film negative and normal modes. Videos can be streamed directly off of YouTube which quickly opens the door to a large library of movies to experiment with. Photos can be viewed in the same manner.
Playback can be done normally in fullscreen or using augmented reality. AR technology allows a video to be "stuck" to any flat surface like paper money or any other object near the phone and played right on top of it.
One's artistic flare can then be shared with the world with the function to take a screenshot and send it to any social network site or e-mail address.
Currently Comic Director is only available for Android devices running Ice Cream Sandwich version 4 and above. It is available in both free and paid version on Google Play and Amazon markets. Aroha says that as the app gains momentum extra effects, comic frames, tag lines and even an iPhone version will be in the works.
© Japan Today
5 Comments
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John Master
Hm.... Japanese manga on Samsung phone... something is wrong here... Why not use Xperia Z? eh?
Patric Spohn
This app still needs major improvements. Just checked it out. Way too slow in processing videos. Playback not smooth at all. And it doesn't let me safe the final work. What's the point of sending a screenshot of one frame? Uninstalled it.
huggy93
seems like an interesting app...will check it out....actually am looking for manga publishers in Japan who publish manga books because I want to submit my own book to try and get it published (it's written in Japanese and English). does anybody know of any publishers, I can send my samples to?
HonestDictator
Good thing about this is that manga artists just saved themselves a lot of time having to do backgrounds...
Fadamor
But they'll still have to go in and make sure any store names are suitably modified to avoid trademark violations.